Real Life & Liars (25 page)

No one else seems to have heard. Katya comes closer, drying her hands on a towel. She approaches warily. “Is that what this is? You think you’re pointless?”

“The university doesn’t want me anymore. You kids don’t need me; in fact, sometimes I wonder if what I ever said sank in at all.”

“What does that mean?” She tosses the towel on the counter.

“I tried so hard to raise you the best way I knew how. To not be trapped by material desires.” Now I turn my gaze at Ivan, giggling with Jenny. “To have self-confidence to pursue your dreams, to treat yourself with respect.” At this I look at Irina, now in a chair with Darius massaging her shoulders. She’s staring at her new wedding band.

“You could have done worse,” she says wryly, snapping out the towel to fold it again. “We turned out more or less okay.”

I shake my head; she took that far more personally than I meant. “I’m very proud of all of you, what you’ve accomplished. But I
sometimes think it was all innate within you, and my influence was nil.”

Kat leans against the counter next to me, facing the family. “Do you remember when we had that big fight about the dress?”

“Oh Lord, not that again.”

“You were trying to force me to be a nonconformist. Do you get the irony in that? You wanted me to conform to your ideals of being a rebel. So, I rebelled by being as conformist as I possibly could. We were no different than millions of other mother-daughters in the world, only you were the one smoking pot and dressing like a hippie.”

“I wasn’t smoking then.” Not much, anyway.

“You know what I mean.”

“So my influence has been opposite of what I intended? That’s not something to treasure on Mother’s Day.”

She moves around to stand in front of me. “You influenced us more than you know, but you didn’t do it with slogans and granola. You did it just by existing. And anyway, you’re still needed. Look at Reenie, she’s about to go to pieces as it is.”

Katya doesn’t know about the bleeding, and I’d like to tell her, but it’s not my place to do so. “So, it’s only Reenie who needs me?”

Katya turns back to the kitchen counter and starts mopping up stray bits of pancake mix. “I need you,” she says in such a low voice, it’s like she’s speaking to herself. “I might need you much more pretty soon.”

I catch her eye and raise my eyebrows. She looks over her shoulder at Charles and gestures with her head.

Ah. I see. I can also see the tan line on her left hand where her wedding ring used to be.

In the quietest whisper I can manage, I ask, “Are you splitting up?”

Her only answer is a tiny shake of her head.

I’m distracted from Katya by a loud chorus from the family. I look up to see Ivan, pulling his ear and turning pink in the center of a crowd. They are all exhorting him to do something, but what I don’t know.

I pick up on it when Jenny says, “I’ll go get your guitar. You don’t show off your talent enough.” She skips away up the stairs, like she’s been running up those steps her entire life. It’s remarkable sometimes how easily someone slips into a family.

“Oh, I showed off my talent enough in college,” Van says, grimacing. “Parking myself under a tree outside and playing sensitive folk songs. You know I didn’t get one single person stopping to listen? Not even the old man who dug cans out of the trash to return them for the deposit.”

Katya remarks, “You probably picked a really poor location, full of people too busy to stop. You always were crap at marketing.”

“It’s a fair cop,” says Ivan in a foppish British accent, winking at Jenny, now presenting his guitar. I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, but Jenny seems to think it’s funny.

“Coffee’s ready,” says Max, as Ivan arranges himself on a kitchen chair. Even Chip and Taylor drift in from the living room. Ivan strums and hums and tunes up for a minute, and takes a breath to start.

A cell phone goes off, playing “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Katya whips around and glares at her husband. Charles takes the phone out of his pocket, punches a button, and it goes silent.

Ivan clears his throat as Jenny announces, “He just wrote this. Like just now, this weekend.”

And so he begins. As he sings, he stares down at his guitar, never once glancing up at the rest of us. I never knew his voice was so nice; a pleasant, easy tenor. As long as he’s fiddled with that guitar and scribbled down lyrics, I’d never heard him do more than hum.

The last notes ring away, and no one speaks for a moment. I steal a look at Katya. Her mouth is open slightly as she stares at her brother unblinking, her hands are—for once—completely still.

Ivan breaks the silence. “It’s not finished obviously, and it’s not very good, I’m not sure about the line about putting out the fires and I think the melody is—”

“Oh, shut up,” Jenny says cheerfully. “It’s marvelous.”

“Wow, Van.” Katya, next to me in her unfamiliar stillness, hasn’t taken her eyes off him yet. “That’s…wow. Really good.” She shoots a quick look at her husband, then down at the floor.

“Yeah!” chirps Kit. “I bet the radio would play it. That oldies station anyway.”

“Oldies!” scoffs Chip. “How can it be an oldie if Uncle Van just now wrote it?”

Kit scowls at him. “You know what I mean! Simple listening music, whatever.”

“Easy listening,” says Van, smirking. “Thanks, Kit.”

Van searches out his older sister’s eyes, but she has turned back to the counter, again stirring that batter to within an inch of its life.

Max abandons his post at the camp stove and grabs Ivan’s hand in both of his for a healthy shake. “Wonderful, son. That’s the best you’ve done yet.”

Van laughs. “Sure, Dad. I don’t think I’ve ever played one for you before.”

“I bet it’s your best, anyway.”

“Yeah, it probably is,” he says, getting up from the chair. “I’m going to put this away.” He gestures with his guitar.

“I think he should go to Nashville,” pipes up Jenny. Van stops in his tracks. “Break into the music scene. That’s where all the songwriters go, so he tells me.”

“Really? You would go?” asks Irina, her eyes shiny as she looks up at him, now halfway up the stairs.

“No. I don’t know. Well, maybe. We’ll see. Probably…” Van continues muttering as he goes up the stairs. Jenny winks in our direction and follows him up.

Well, I’ll be damned.

My phone rings, and I almost jump out of my skin. It’s been so quiet with no power. I answer because I’m closest.

It’s Paul.

“Is everyone okay over there?” he asks.

“We’re fine. That big tree is down, but it fell across the street, not onto the house.”

“That is lucky.”

“Yes, we are very lucky.”

For a moment I forget that I’m on the phone. We are lucky, aren’t we?

“Mira?”

“Sorry, Paul. What about you and yours? Is the homestead okay?”

“My porch got crushed by some limbs, but nothing that can’t be fixed. Still looking for the dogs, but I think they’re fine, just spooked by the thunder.”

I usually look forward to Paul’s calls, even when they’re just business, because he can usually be counted on to say something complimentary or funny. Something that makes me smile bigger and feel warm. But now, I just want him off the phone to get back to my family. I rush through remaining pleasantries and hang up before he’s even finished saying good-bye.

Katya’s kids elbow each other as they sit around the kitchen table, laughing with goofy good nature, making a big show of fighting over the pancakes. Chip and Tay look none the worse for wear, considering their shenanigans last night. Darius and Charles sip coffee, leaning against the wall near the dining room, and their posture is so similar that I do a double take: both have ankles lightly crossed, the hand without the coffee casually hooked in a front pants pocket. Irina doesn’t notice; she listens to Katya over by the kitchen window. I can’t hear them, but I can guess by that sweet glow over Katya’s face—normally so severe, now soft and open—that she’s reminiscing about the baby days. Jenny and Van are deep in conversation in the living room, just outside the kitchen, until Van takes a shift at the camp stove to let Max eat some pancakes. I perch on the kitchen counter to crunch my muesli.

The cool breeze stirs the cooking smells through the house, and my family’s chatter warms me like an afghan, and if I remain in this very moment, this moment alone, everything seems bliss.

They talk about road conditions, and the Detroit Tigers, then Katya squashes a burgeoning argument about the war in Iraq between Darius and Charles, by asking, “Mom? When do you see the doctor next?”

I wipe my fingers on my pants. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t remember?” she prompts.

“I don’t know. I haven’t made another appointment.” I remember Dr. Graham thrusting a card toward me, telling me in her soft, kind voice to come back when I’ve had a few days to think. When I didn’t take it—my vision was shrinking and I felt like I was in a tunnel, I just kept stepping backward—I saw Max’s hand take it from her.

The room grows quiet again, and the silence seems sharp in contrast to the happy buzz that came before. I stare down at my cereal, going to mush in my bowl. I don’t want to see Katya’s face, hard in judgment, or Irina, prematurely mourning.

I catch myself thinking, why me? And I wonder who I’m talking to.

“I’ll call the doctor in the morning,” I tell them, and I’m surprised to realize that I actually mean that.

I raise my eyes from my cereal bowl and find my family exchanging glances with each other, sending those telegraphic messages that families do. Darius squeezes Irina’s shoulders, and she puts a hand over one of his and squeezes his hand in return.

I tell them, “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll listen to the doctor and see what my options are.”

“Good,” says Katya, through a mouthful of pancakes. “Glad to know you’re being so sensible.”

“Watch it, or I might change my mind,” I say, grinning at her. “I’d hate to go all sensible on you.”

The timbre in the room changes, and the conversation bubbles up like champagne in a flute. I catch Irina and Darius holding hands tightly, and though her face still looks pale, she’s smiling. Jenny and Van are openly cracking jokes about dead parrots, and Katya ruffles little Kit’s hair. In profile, I realize how much those two look alike, and I wonder if they’ll fight through her adolescence as much as her mother and I did.

I was forcing her to be nonconformist, I suppose, but it made
so much sense at the time, wanting to impress my ideals upon her. Was that so different than a dad teaching his son to play football because he played in high school? It didn’t help matters that by the time Irina came along I didn’t have the same energy or time to comb the thrift stores for recycled clothes, and I relied more on packaged food for lunches. Irina got to fit in, just because she was last, and I was worn down. But to Katya it must have seemed brutally unfair.

For the moment though, my family looks fairly content, nearly happy, if not for the sadness in Irina’s smile as she worries about the baby she didn’t know she wanted. And Charles still looks like he might throw up. Still, a better-than-average mealtime gathering.

Was that all it took? Me agreeing to call the doctor? They must think they know what I’m going to do, that I’ll run in there and get my tit cut off.

We’ll see about that.

But then, no one is insisting that I do anything. They seem honestly contented, for now anyway, that I’m just going to listen. Keep an open mind.

Isn’t that what a flower child is supposed to be? Open-minded?

Saying good-bye to my children is always bittersweet, and this morning the bitter wins out. My mortality looms over their departures, as I imagine it will for every parting from now until the final one.

Katya gives me the tightest hug I can remember receiving in years, and she hangs on for an extra second. This chills me; she hasn’t shown me this much genuine need since before puberty. What has Charles done?

Their family parades out into the rented Ford Explorer, and the house feels ten times bigger without the grandchildren and all their noisy electronic stuff. My hit of relief at having the extra
space back is followed by a sinking feeling of despair and guilt, because how many more times will I get to see them visit and stand in the driveway waving at them as they go?

Tears leak onto the bridge of my nose, and I sniff hard, watching their car retreat until it rounds the corner, out of view.

Darius and Irina leave next. Irina whispers into my ear, “No more blood so far.” I tell her to call me tomorrow. She doesn’t tell me if she’s sticking it out with Darius, and maybe she doesn’t even know yet, herself. But they’ve been in constant physical contact since they came down for brunch. Darius himself is unreadable. I wonder if I’ll get the chance to know him better; if he’ll drop his walls and relax around us. He can’t be this placid all the time, it’s inhuman.

He shakes my hand, then pulls me in for a light embrace. “Stay well, Mrs. Zielinski,” he says.

I smile up at him. “I won’t expect you to call me mom, but really, Mira is just fine. And I mean it about dinner. Please come again to see us.”

He nods and guides Irina out by the shoulder.

Ivan and Jenny stay to help us do the dishes. The radio tells us power might be out tomorrow, too. I don’t mind. I like being off the grid. It’s like the real world is suspended, and that feels very good, especially right now.