Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (20 page)

They went to the party, not because of anything Kyle had said, but because the next day Elizabeth told her to go. She insisted.

When Piper had arrived that morning, Elizabeth was with Lena, her favorite of the hospice workers, and she smiled at Piper over the powder blue photo album Lena held open before her and said, “Peter.” Peter’s baby album. As Lena turned the pages of the heavy book, Elizabeth pointed out Peter having his first bath. Peter in his super saucer, his bouncy chair, his swing, sleeping in the Björn on Tom’s chest with his bald head flopped to one side. Peter had been a sweet baby, chirpy and rosy and heavily eyelashed, the kind you might see curled inside a flower in one of those Anne Geddes photographs.

When Piper walked Lena to the door, Lena said, “Elizabeth was a little restless last night, called out in her sleep a couple of times.”

Piper felt a pulse of gratitude for the way Lena so often called Elizabeth by name when speaking about her. With others, sometimes even with Tom and Piper, Elizabeth was an omnipresent, inevitable “she.” Lena smiled wryly, reached out and squeezed Piper’s hand. Habitually physically aloof except with her closest friends, Piper was learning a language of small touches: a squeeze of the fingers, a hand placed on a shoulder or a cheek. Lena’s squeeze said, “It was a harder night than I’m telling you it was, but she made it.”

“But she’s good this morning,” Lena went on, nodding, “it’s a good morning.”

“When I see her sitting in a chair, smiling, I know it’s a good morning. Thank you.”

But when Piper reentered the room, she saw that the good morning had ended. The baby album was lying facedown and open on the floor, and Elizabeth’s face was a mask of white-lipped, smoldering rage. Piper had seen Elizabeth like this before, but not often. Usually, the anger spattered out like grease from a pan and could be directed toward anyone: Piper for making the soup too hot, Astrid for hurting her head with the hairbrush, Ginny for not keeping the children quiet, Tom for buying the wrong fruit (tangerines instead of clementines), the wrong sheets (carded percale instead of mercerized sateen), the wrong small bottled waters (plain instead of fluoridated). She never let the children see her angry; possibly she didn’t feel angry in their presence. Only rarely did they see her cry.

Everyone who knew Elizabeth admired her general demeanor of good-humored forbearance; they took it as courage, and Piper could understand that. It was courage. But Piper treasured the angry Elizabeth, the one who lashed out indiscriminately, ignoring considerations of fairness or proportion. Failing to rise above, Elizabeth seemed more earthbound, lashed to this life with ordinary human weakness and emotion.
Go for it!
Piper would think at those moments.
This whole thing is a fucking travesty. Take it out on everyone you know!

But moments like this one frightened Piper, when the anger wasn’t a short burst but a devouring fury that gripped Elizabeth with the force of a seizure. Invariably, this kind of anger left Elizabeth weepy and spent; it seemed to visibly suck life out of her. Now, from where she stood, Piper could see Elizabeth seem to catch her breath and then her chest began heaving too hard and too quickly, and Piper was running across the room, the phrase “irregular breathing” whipping around inside her head. Irregular breathing: like cool extremities, confusion, purplish mottling on the legs, irregular breathing was a sign of active dying.

Piper knelt beside Elizabeth’s chair and took hold of her hands. They were warm. Impatiently, Elizabeth shook off Piper’s touch, slapped her hands away.

“Betts,” gasped Piper, “Betts, it’s okay.” Elizabeth glared at Piper with so much hatred that Piper fell back on her heels.

“It. Is. Not. Okay.” Elizabeth shoved out the words through gritted teeth, and then, someplace deep inside her body, a sound began forming, forming and rising, forming and rising, until it came out as an unearthly shriek. In a flash, Piper remembered a wedding she’d attended years ago at a former plantation house: the peacocks and their unbearable screaming.

“It’s not fair!” screamed Elizabeth. “It’s not fucking fair!”

For a full five minutes, she shrieked and ranted, her body racked with the effort. Finally, she picked up her glass of water and tried to fling it against the wall. Water arced upward, but the glass fell short and rolled to a stop on the silk Kashmir rug she and Tom had bought themselves for their tenth wedding anniversary.

With Elizabeth’s wailing in her ears and with one fluid motion, Piper grabbed the glass and threw it as hard as she could. It went high, hit the crown molding, and shattered spectacularly, shards of glass raining down. The wailing stopped—for a second, Piper thought maybe time itself had stopped—and then Elizabeth began to laugh, not a hysterical laugh, as Piper might have expected, but a lovely, bubbly sound that seemed to fall around the room like confetti or snow.

The laughter didn’t fix everything. What could? After it stopped, Elizabeth was wrung out and still deeply sad, but the laughter cleared a space where Elizabeth could talk and Piper could listen. In a parched almost-whisper, Elizabeth talked about her children and how she could not bear to leave them, could not bear the thought of all she would miss.

“The story,” she said, sobbing, “I’ll miss the whole story. Dating, college, jobs, weddings. I don’t get to know how anything turns out, and I wanted to. I wanted to be there for all of it.”

Later, she said, “Wow. I’ve been talking about myself for hours. Clearly, I need something new to think about.”

Elizabeth gave a short laugh, smoothed her hair, and her smile held a trace of her old jauntiness. She said, “Okay. I didn’t want to say anything before, but here it is: I need gossip, Pipe. And you are seriously falling down on the job. I know Kate’s party is coming up because she sent us an invitation, and I get that you might not feel like going, but you have to. That’s just the way it is. You go to that party and
get me some gossip
.”

The party was not the ordeal Piper had imagined, but that was perhaps due to the fact that she never felt as though she were really there. When Kate opened the door to find Piper and Kyle, she did what Piper would consider, for the rest of her life, a beautiful thing: instead of ushering them in, she stepped down onto the porch, shut the door behind her, and enfolded Piper in a strong, true hug. “Are you sure?” she whispered in Piper’s ear.

When Piper nodded, Kate turned, opened the door, Piper and Kyle followed her inside, and the change happened. Piper was present for the hug, but as soon as she stepped over the threshold of Kate’s house, steeling herself for the onslaught of voices, music, and lights, a strange sensation overtook her. She felt weightless, flickering, transparent, and like she was watching everything through gauze. When people spoke to her, their voices seemed to come from a great distance.

So when Parvee Patel exclaimed, “You’re so thin! What’s your secret?” Piper did not feel like yanking out a fistful of Parvee’s hair and saying, “A dying friend. You should get one,” as she would have felt like doing under normal circumstances. She just smiled. (It was true, Piper had noticed it when she put on her black dress and found it loose. For the first time in her life, she had lost weight without knowing it, and, also for the first time, she had
discovered
she’d lost weight without caring.)

Dutifully, she collected gossip. Megan was pregnant at forty and was having neither CVS nor amnio. Jilly Keyes had reconnected online with her high school boyfriend, an attorney-to-the-B-liststars, and had moved to L.A. to marry him. The Lowerys had stunned everyone by scrapping their plans to remodel their kitchen. Thad Ramsey’s oldest son from his first marriage had gotten thrown out of college for cheating. Joshy Bray had almost gotten thrown out of kindergarten for cutting off a classmate’s ponytail, but his father had won him an eleventh-hour reprieve with a large and well-timed donation to Tallyrand’s annual fund. The Howards’ country-house roof had leaked in the last big rain and while their antique four-poster had suffered damage, their (small, minor, but
still
) N. C. Wyeth had not. Margot Cleary had new lips; Amory Weiss had new breasts; Sydney Overton was spider vein free and loving it.

Through all of these conversations, the floating, absent sensation never left Piper. Several times, she thought bemusedly,
Who are these people?
and found it astonishing that not long ago they had been hers, a tribe the female half of which she had—there was no getting around it—presided over. She felt like a ghost, as though people might walk right through her, as though she were the one who had died. (Although no one has died, she reminded herself.) While she didn’t miss this world, she saw from the way people looked at her—her dress, her hair, the newly visible butterfly of bones below her clavicle—and from the way they listened to her speak that she could still, at any time, step back into it, regain her old position, and the thought was comforting.

All evening, she felt Kyle’s approval, and that was comforting, too. While they spent most of the party in separate conversations and were not seated together at dinner, she was constantly aware of his presence in the room, just as she was always aware of her children when they were in a public space. Now and then, as they always had, she and Kyle would catch each other’s eyes and smile carefully calibrated smiles, ones that said things like “I’m fine,” “Wait till you hear this,” or “Rescue me.” Earlier, they’d gotten dressed in silence, and he had neglected to tell her that she looked beautiful, but she saw that everything was all right now or almost all right. Nothing had been lost that couldn’t be regained.

So the party was not a disaster. But as soon as the sole of Piper’s Stuart Weitzman satin sandal touched Kate’s front porch, the floating sensation vanished, Piper slid back into her body with a thud, and she nearly ran to the car, where, at Kyle’s request, she had left her cell phone. There were three messages from Tom, one for each hour of the party, as he’d promised, the third of which had come in just ten minutes before. Elizabeth had eaten some of the egg strata her mother had made at her request (it had been a Sunday brunch staple all through Elizabeth’s childhood), and had watched
The Grinch
with the kids, had done lullaby time, and had fallen asleep afterward.

In the most recent message, Tom said, “Elizabeth’s sleeping fine. No agitation or yelling out. Before she fell asleep, she asked me if you carried your satin Kate Spade something bag with the something feathers to the party tonight. So if you could report on that tomorrow, we’d all appreciate it.”

Tomorrow. Piper closed her eyes and repeated the word inside her head, letting it unfold slowly, heavily, like a prayer:
to-mor-row
.

“Well?” asked Kyle, as she flipped the phone shut.

“She’s alive,” said Piper.

She died, of course. Not before Christmas. And not the day after Christmas, although Piper had woken in a panic at four
A.M.
on the twenty-sixth, certain that she’d somehow blown it, that all her bargaining for Christmas, Christmas, Christmas had been misunderstood by whomever or whatever she’d been bargaining with; “Christmas
at least
” is what she should have said. “Christmas for starters.”

But Elizabeth lived through December and into the New Year, and for two days in late January, she appeared to be ready to live forever.

Cornelia and Teo dropped by on the first day. They’d come, separately and together, several times since that first visit, and once Cornelia and Elizabeth had watched a black-and-white movie that featured a man, a woman, a leopard, a dinosaur bone, and a lot of falling down. Piper had never liked black-and-white movies, but while she watched almost none of it and did not even know what it was called, she loved the movie because it had made Elizabeth behave like Elizabeth, laughing and calling out advice, warnings, fashion tips to the people on the screen.

Today, Cornelia and Teo brought a fat, gorgeous-smelling braid of homemade bread, still warm from the oven, and a ramekin of whipped honey butter.

That morning, Elizabeth had showered and dressed in the downstairs bathroom before Tom had even come down. She had told Tom that she had considered going upstairs, she’d felt that strong, but she hadn’t wanted to wake up the kids. When Tom told Piper this in one of their quick update conversations on the back steps, she’d given an involuntary shudder and he’d nodded his understanding. Despite the drugs Elizabeth took to strengthen her bones, they were still frighteningly fragile, porous from the secondary bone cancer. A fall could be disastrous.

Tom had taken the kids to a birthday party. He hadn’t wanted to go or to take the children away from Elizabeth when she was feeling so well, but she’d told him to go, go.

“She told me, ‘I’ll be here when you get back.’ She was laughing, and I realized that that’s what she wants from us, to act like this will last. But I’ll be back in two hours max.” He took off the glasses that until recently Piper hadn’t even known he owned (“Kept falling asleep with my contacts in during my nights with Elizabeth,” he’d explained, “I’d wake up with the things glued to my eyes”), and rubbed his eyes.

“You’re not sleeping much at all, are you?” asked Piper.

“I’m fine. I lay down for a couple of hours last night,” he said, then he shook his head. “But now I keep thinking, ‘Man, what if she’d fallen in the shower?’ And I can just see it, see her falling. I shouldn’t have left her. I should have stayed downstairs.”

But sitting at the kitchen table in black yoga pants and the dark red cashmere sweater Tom had given her for Christmas, Elizabeth appeared less breakable than she had in months. Her eyes and skin were brighter, as though a light inside her body had been relit, and when she lifted her glass, pushed back her hair, her movements were suffused with a grace that Piper recognized as the simple absence of exhaustion. When Cornelia and Teo walked through the back door and saw her, Piper watched their faces register surprise, then delight, and for a moment, she felt glad that they didn’t know what she herself knew: that this is the way it happened sometimes, a day or two of wellness right before the end, like a mirage in the desert.