All of Us and Everything (25 page)

That night, Augusta couldn't sleep. She padded down the stairs to the kitchen. She turned on the light and then saw a hunched figure sitting at the table.

She let out a small scream before realizing that it was Nick Flemming, his elbows on the table, eating buttered toast cut into triangles. Ingmar and Toby darted out from under the table, nosing Augusta. She shooed them away. “I'm fine. I'm fine,” she assured them and then she asked Nick what he was doing awake.

“Can't sleep. Too much time to make up for. My brain keeps waking me up. Consciously and subconsciously, I don't want to miss any more. Not another minute, Augusta.” His voice was almost angry.

She walked to the fridge, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat down next to him. “How was today with Atty and Liv?”

“It was perfect.”

“Really? Perfect. With Atty and Liv.” She laughed.

“It wasn't perfect in the traditional sense of the word. I mean, it was imperfect and flawed and I don't like riding those things. But it was perfect because it wasn't perfect. It just was, which is perfect.”

“You never liked Norman Rockwell's kind of perfect anyway, I guess.”

“Why aren't you asleep?” he asked.

“Too many people breathing in the house. It's so full of heartbeats.”

“We made those heartbeats, you know?”

Augusta looked at him. “I imagine that your body is still full of scars, like a topographic map of old wounds.”

“I got shot a lot and knifed too.” He leaned forward and smiled. “You want to see it?” He motioned to his chest. “It's available for display.”

She ignored him. “We were so close to telling them.” There was a time when she gave an ultimatum and he'd agreed.

“But then we couldn't.” A fellow agent's son went missing and then his body was found—in parts—in Miami.

“How is Gerard?” Augusta asked. She'd never met the man who'd lost his son, but she'd thought of him often over the years. “Do you ever hear from him?”

Nick shook his head. “My covers, the legends about who I was, where I came from. I wasn't Nick Flemming. I wasn't a husband or a father. It had to stay that way. It might have saved us.”

“Who were you?” Augusta had never asked before.

Nick knew that only Ru had figured that out. For a while, he'd been Peter Wilderman. He'd grown up in White Plains, New York. His father had sold insurance. His mother taught violin lessons. He had no siblings. He'd played baseball decently in high school. He attended Penn State and got average grades. He joined the military. He didn't play the violin even though he'd been raised in a musical household.

None of this was true, but over time it reminded him of the truth.

“I can't tell you who I was,” Nick said. “Sometimes it's still who I am.” He rapped his knuckles on the table and said, “You know the real person. The kids will too. This is who I want to be.” He reached out and slipped his hand over hers.

His hand was callused and warm.

“I missed you,” she whispered.

“I missed you too.”

This was said so softly that Liv, who also hadn't been able to sleep and was smoking on the patio, couldn't hear it. She'd heard all of it up until this point and now moved closer to the open window. The kitchen curtains were still. She was in the dark, unseen, and she stood there, watching her parents hold hands. She felt like she was seeing something rare and precious—a species that had been thought to be extinct. She'd heard that the passenger pigeon used to be one of the most common birds in the world, but the last one died in a zoo. Love—is that what this was? Rare and miraculously still alive.

Two days later, Esme found her father shaving in the third-floor bathroom; the door hung open, exposing him in the light of a single bulb. Wearing only a thin bathrobe that revealed a triangle of his gray-haired chest and black socks, he looked like an old man. He had jowls, leathery wrinkled skin, age spots, and liver spots—Esme didn't know how to distinguish the two—and small white spots where he seemed to have lost pigment altogether. He had to pull taut his loose neck skin to get a clean shave. His ankles were more delicate than she'd imagined a man's could be, much less someone who'd perhaps killed people, professionally. His little dog was sitting on the bath mat at his heels.

She'd planned on barging in and making demands. But he noticed her standing there and stopped shaving. He tapped his razor in the lip of the sudsy sink. Half his face foamed, he asked, “What can I do for you?” Because he owed her, was this how he'd have to address her from now on? He put his hands on his hips, his stance wide like a cop's, but then he slouched. He was tired.

Her mother had loved this man.

Maybe her mother still did.

Men are dangerous.

Who had they invited into this home?

“Nothing,” she said. “I'll talk to you when you're dressed.”

“I'm dressed enough,” he said.

“That's okay,” she said.

“Esme,” he said. She hadn't ever really heard her father say her name. She cocked her head and tried to hold the sound of it in her mind. “I tried, kiddo. I really did.”

“Tried what?”

“To be a father.”

She shook her head. “I'll wait. This can wait. You should be dressed.”

She walked down the hall to Liv and Ru's bedroom. She knocked on their door, glanced back at her father who stood there, framed in the bathroom doorway, then walked into the bedroom.

Liv was folding laundry, wearing a bra and matching lacy black panties.

“Someone actually buys that stuff?” Esme said.

“What stuff?”

“Uncomfortable frilly undergarments,” Esme said.

“I think the term
undergarments
fell out of fashion in 1957.”

Ru walked in, holding a cup of coffee. She instinctively turned her ring around on her left hand so that it faced inward. “What do we have here? A powwow?”

“She came in to discuss
undergarments,
” Liv said. “And maybe Eisenhower and the new hula-hoop craze.”

Then Atty called from down the hall, “Mom!”

“What?” Esme called back.

Atty popped her head into the room. “Augusta is making pancakes.” She'd been calling her grandmother Augusta for as long as Esme could remember. “Are you all in?”

The three sisters froze.

“What's wrong?” Atty asked.

“Where's Jessamine?” Liv grabbed a pair of shorts and a tank top and started scrambling to get dressed.

“She's downstairs.”

“Why is Augusta
cooking
?” Ru asked her sisters.

“This is what I came in to talk about!” Esme said. “I had this plan where we were all going to drive to Great Neck, and Nick was going to tell Darwin Webber he's sorry, but then, there he was, like an actual old man, shaving in an actual bathroom—my
father.
And I thought, what if my parents get back together? What if she's cooking in some weird attempt to woo Nick Flemming?”

“That's not how you woo a man,” Liv said to Atty, yanking the tank top over her head. “And God, seriously, people stopped
wooing
each other around the time they stopped wearing
undergarments.
”

Ru shook her head. “She's not wooing him. Not possible.”

“Why not?” Atty asked, and there was a hopefulness that made Esme wonder if Atty hoped she and Doug would get back together.

Liv straightened up. “What if they did? Maybe they should.” She hadn't told them about the night she eavesdropped on them in the kitchen, but she'd thought about them together ever since. Could it possibly work?

“I think they shouldn't. At all,” Esme said. “He's a wolf in an old man's bathrobe.”

“Regardless of what we think, they can't. It's been too long,” Ru said. “Too much has happened. I mean, people can love each other and get knocked off-course by almost anything. You think their love can withstand all it's got to have been through?”

“Where's Cliff?” Liv said. She'd already properly medicated herself to face the day. Her meds made her a little more frank than usual. “You two really haven't seen each other in almost a year and he's still not showing up?”

“This isn't about me. Our mother is cooking. Food!”

“Have you and Cliff been kicked off-course?” Atty asked.

Ru shook her head. “He's fine.” And he was fine. He had a deal with Sony. “Are we going to witness this historic cooking event or not?”

The four of them walked quickly down the hall, the stairs, and into the kitchen.

Augusta stood at the stove. Jessamine sat at the 1940s-style tin-top table, her pocketbook in her lap, her sunglasses still on.

“What's this?” Esme asked.

“She's cooking,” Jessamine said.

“I'm cooking!” Augusta sang.

“What are you doing, Jessamine?”

“I'm waiting for a pancake.” What Jessamine meant was that her life had changed forever. It was like watching one of her children grow up. She felt an itchy sense of impending freedom, tinged with nostalgia. Jessamine was bound for change as well.

“Who wants a pancake?” Augusta said.

“You don't cook,” Ru said.

Liv sat down across from Jessamine. “I'll take one.”

“Me too!” Atty said.

“With blueberries?” Augusta asked.

“I'll have one with blueberries,” Esme said.

“I'm not sure if I should eat any at all,” Ru said. “What does this mean? Why are you cooking?”

“I'm providing nourishment for my children,” Augusta said.

Nick walked in, his dog padding along behind him. He was clean-shaven, wearing a short-sleeved buttondown and khaki shorts. He had bony knees. The kitchen's transistor radio was set to an oldies station, playing “Ring My Bell,” which suddenly seemed to Ru like a really dirty song. “Good morning,” he said and he sat down, too.

“This isn't right,” Esme said.

Ru wondered if this
was
right, but, because they had no experience with it, it just seemed wrong.

“This is part of the gift of embracing the moment,” Liv said. “We've got to just take hold.”

Esme thought she knew what she meant and took this opportunity to announce the plans for the day. She had to take control. She had no choice. She wouldn't be able to scrabble on with her life without knowing the truth about Darwin Webber, without seeing him with her own eyes—and in so doing, seeing the life she didn't have. “We're going to Great Neck,” she said. “So Nick Flemming can take the fatwa off Darwin Webber's head and apologize for fucking over our lives.”

“It wasn't a fatwa,” her father said. “Clearly, there was no fatwa involved.”

“Do you do fatwas?” Atty asked.

Nick opened his mouth but Augusta jumped in first. “It'll be a family outing.”

“We're all going?” Atty asked.

“Of course,” Liv said to Atty. “This is about
us.
You included.”

“Yes,” Ru said, feeling loose in her joints. “I mean it's not like a picnic or going to the zoo or playing Frisbee in a park together, but it's
something.
”

They all looked at Nick Flemming. He sat there and stared back. “I've jumped out of airplanes,” he said, “swam away from an exploding boat once. I know torture—both ways. I've survived in the jungles of Zaire. I was shot at close range in the bathroom of the Vienna opera house. My body is peppered with shrapnel—some of it's been with me for decades. But you people,” he said, sweeping the room with one crooked finger. “You people scare the hell out of me.”

The radio was now playing Donna Summers singing “Love to love you baby…”—with its sexy backup moaning. The kitchen was filling with smoke. Augusta had lost track of the griddle.

“I think that's a yes,” Ru said. “He's in.”

“Yep,” Liv said. “That was a yes.”

“Okay.” Esme took a deep breath. “We're going.”

“Are we?” Atty asked.

“We are,” Augusta said.

“The smoke detector is going to go off,” Jessamine said.

And then it did.