The History of Us (7 page)

At the airport Eloise dropped the three siblings off and went to park the car. Josh hefted Claire’s duffel bag through the automatic doors while Theo and Claire followed. Theo wanted to hook her arm through Claire’s, but something made her hesitate,
even slow her pace, so that she fell a little behind her sister. Claire was really exaggerating her dancer walk, Theo noticed. Usually she did that only with her dancer friends, all of whom dressed in the same tunic-and-leggings style and walked with their feet turned out, their legs leaping one at a time to the front.
Look at us,
that walk said.
We know who we are. We know you admire what we do.

Look at her baby sister: so secure, so sure-footed. Theo envied Claire her passion for dancing. She envied Claire all her passions. Claire was in so many ways so much more practical than Theo. Or if
practical
wasn’t the word, with her ballet-dancing ambitions, maybe grounded, or reasonable, or focused. And yet Claire’s life was the one with the all-consuming romances, the one with the overwhelming griefs. “You feel what you feel,” she’d said once. “And then you get over it.” In her voice had been the verbal shrug with which she often answered Theo’s questions about her nature, about how she lived her life.

Without glancing back Josh went ahead to the line for automated check-in. Theo followed Claire over to the display of arrivals and departures, and they both confirmed that her flight was still on time. Then Claire turned, gave her an uncertain smile, and went on standing there. “Don’t you need to go with Josh?” Theo asked.

Claire shook her head. “He can check me in,” she said. “I used his credit card to charge the flight.”

“Oh,” Theo said.

“I don’t have one,” Claire said.

“We should have gotten you one before you left,” Theo said.

Claire shrugged. “I can take care of it.”

“Right,” Theo said and tried to sound like she meant it. It was
hard to imagine Claire taking care of practical matters, without her or Eloise to guide her. That morning she’d repacked Claire’s bag, which had been a chaos of balled-up T-shirts, single socks, hair elastics thrown in loose, and not nearly enough pairs of leggings for a girl who wore them almost every day and would for the first time have to do her own laundry. Theo sighed. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

Claire frowned a little, as though this were an accusation. “You’ll still have Josh.”

“Not really,” Theo said. “He’s always mad at me. I can’t say anything without him getting his back up.”

“That’s because he thinks you’re disappointed in him for giving up his music.”

“Really?”

Claire nodded. She was watching Theo with a weird intensity. “Are you?” she asked.

Theo looked past her, up at the screen and its long, long list of where people went, and where they came back from. “Am I? I guess maybe. I guess so.”

“But why?”

“It was his
purpose
. I feel like he sacrificed his purpose in life to that fucked-up relationship. He just quit. You don’t just quit. How could you even think about quitting?” Theo shook her head. “I guess I understand why he came back here, but I don’t understand why he stayed. He should be in a bigger city. He should be leading a bigger life.”

“But you came back here. You could have gone somewhere else for graduate school.”

“As Eloise is so fond of pointing out,” Theo said with a rueful smile. “And the chances that I’ll get a job here are slim. The
chances that I’ll get a job at all are slim, but if I do I won’t be able to stay.”

“Do you wish you could stay?”

Theo shrugged. “Eloise would kill me.”

“Eloise wants us all to go,” Claire said. “Everybody wants me to go.”

“But not because we don’t want you with us.”

“Because you want me to be all I can be.”

“It’s not our fault you’re a star.”

“Maybe I’m not a star,” Claire said, looking at the floor. “Maybe I’m a member of the corps and always will be, and I could be just as happy doing that here as anywhere else.”

“Maybe,” Theo said. She reached out to smooth her sister’s already smooth hair. “But I doubt it. You should be where the action is.”

“There’s action here,” Claire said.

Theo frowned. “Claire, what are you getting at?”

“Nothing.” She bit her lip and released it. “Nothing. Just . . . don’t be too hard on Josh.”

“I’m not. He just thinks I am.”

Josh was headed back to them now, Claire’s boarding pass in his hand, just as Eloise came through the doors. They gathered in a circle, the four of them, their makeshift family. And then Theo, who couldn’t bear her own sadness any longer, said, “Let’s get this over with.”

Obediently her family fell in step, trudging toward security. But a few feet from the end of the line Claire hesitated. She turned to Eloise and said, “Do you remember those bedtime stories you used to tell me?”

“Huh?” Eloise said. “Oh—about Elsewhere?”

Claire nodded. “Where anything you imagine comes true.”

“Some prince was always rushing up to ask you to dance.”

“I used to say, ‘Where is Elsewhere?’ And you’d say, ‘As far as you can get from here.’”

“I don’t remember that,” Eloise said. “But I don’t dispute you.”

Claire dove, suddenly, into Eloise’s arms, but almost as soon as Eloise tightened them around her, Claire pulled away. She turned—she pirouetted—and joined the line of travelers. This time she didn’t look back, but they stood there anyway, watching until they couldn’t see her anymore, watching an extra few minutes, as though she might change her mind.

“Well, that’s that,” Eloise said finally. Theo and Josh made noises of assent, all of them doing their best to affirm that it was good Claire was gone. They’d all worked for this—the endless chauffeuring, the hours of waiting in the lobby of the ballet academy. The thousands of dollars that had gone into classes and summer programs, fund-raisers and season tickets, uniforms and shoes and pair after pair of tights. The performances, the bouquets, the bobby pins, the trouble both Eloise and Theo had taken to learn how to make a proper bun, the bloody Band-Aids on the bathroom floor (Theo yelling, “Claire, that’s disgusting! Throw them away!”). The encouragement, the praise, the stinging in their palms after all that applause. They’d all wanted her to go. But now each of them had an unnerving, weightless feeling, like they’d never realized before that they were balloons, and that Claire—Claire with her need for them, her exacting schedule, her purposeful and organized life—had anchored them to the ground. They could have comforted one another, if any of them had been brave enough to utter this nonsense aloud.

J
osh was on the office phone with potential clients when his cell
rang. He picked it up, saw Claire’s number on the screen, and nearly succumbed to a powerful urge to hang up on the clients and answer her call. He’d been playing phone tag with her in the week since she’d left, and he wanted to know how she was. But more than that he wanted to get off this call. There were times in the course of fulfilling his duties when he became afflicted with an impostor’s anxiety. He saw clearly that he got away with not really knowing what he was doing via the skillful deployment of jokes and personal charm. But when the charm didn’t work—and when he was on speakerphone, with no idea how many people were listening on the other end and no ability to gauge their responses, it was really fucking hard to make it work—he was left spouting stock corporate phrases, checking his crib sheet for lines about Ben’s development philosophy. He grew painfully aware of how often he used the word
approach,
or said he
looked forward
to future interactions, or referred to the listeners’ content as
beautiful
. He felt like a salesman, like a bullshitter, and he hated feeling like that. The people today had made an appointment, asked him to call. You’d think they could have made an
eensy bit more effort, could have laughed at at least one of his jokes. Instead they were mostly silent. He pictured a roomful of people rolling their eyes at one another, mouthing, “What an idiot.”

“Excuse me one moment,” he said. He pressed the Hold button carefully. His cell had stopped ringing. He pushed back from his desk, gripping the edge, dropped his head between his arms, and hyperventilated. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be doing this. Then what should he be doing? His mind obediently offered up a memory of the stage, the guitar strap on his shoulder, the sweat-soaked shirt clinging to his back, the crowd just handing him love: the energy, the adrenaline, the purity of doing only this, caring only about this.
Life comes alive
. That was all gone now. His only option was to finish this call.

When it was over, he put his cell and his keys in his pockets, called out to the office at large that he’d be right back without making eye contact with anyone who might ask to come with him, and went outside. He took long, purposeful strides toward the coffee shop, like any businessman out for a casual stroll. He’d forgotten Claire’s call until the phone in his pocket rang, at which point he remembered it, and took the phone out to see that it was her again. “How’s New York?” he asked. “Because I might be looking to run away.”

“Really?” She sounded worried, so he hastened to say, “No, not really. I just had a rough time with my last call.”

“Well, I have a present for you,” she said. “Are you free tonight?”

“Why?” he asked. “You’re not here, are you?”

“What? No. Of course not. But I got you tickets to a modern dance performance tonight.”

“You did?” He groaned inwardly. He wasn’t a huge fan of dance, modern or otherwise. He’d spent much of his life in the pop-culture trenches, but he’d mostly given high culture a pass. If it hadn’t been for Claire’s performances he’d never have gone to the ballet. He wanted the music to have words. He wanted the dancers to stop gesturing so dramatically. He could have watched more readily if it had been all leaps and spins, but as it was his attention wandered. “How come?”

“Because Adelaide’s in it.”

He could hear her mischievous smile through the phone. “Is that right,” he said. “And why would that matter?”

“Oh,” she said. “I just thought you might be interested in her quality of movement.”

“I thought she was a ballet dancer.”

“She is. But when the company’s off for the summer sometimes the dancers do other stuff. Her piece is probably a contemporary ballet. She’s so good, Josh. I think you’ll enjoy seeing her.”

“And that’s your only motivation?”

“That’s it.”

“If I go, you won’t be waiting to hear if I talked to her?”

“I won’t ask. I won’t even ask you how it was. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

There was a little too much emotion in her tone. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Everything is good,” she said. “I wish I could tell you about it.”

“Why can’t you?”

“You know what I thought about today for some reason?” she said, not answering his question. “How you used to take me on the carousel at the zoo.”

When she said that Josh could remember it, too, her hand in
his as she tugged him toward the animal she wanted to ride, his hands on her waist as he lifted her, her little kicking legs, her serious, intense expression as she held on tight and waited for the ride to start. “You always wanted to ride the zebras.”

“Zebras are cool. They have an excellent sense of style. But I guess you know that.”

“Claire,” he said. “You are weird.”

“No, seriously,” she said. “When you lived in Chicago all you ever wore was black and white.”

“That’s totally untrue. I had at least one red T-shirt.”

“Well, I picture you in black and white.” She laughed. “Like a zebra.”

“Or a Pilgrim.”

“Like a zebra in a Pilgrim hat.”

“This conversation has taken a strange turn,” he said. “Are you in a surreal mood?”

“Kind of,” she said. “Yes. Kind of all the time.”

“Sometimes it’s like that after a big move. Like, whose life is this?” She made a noncommittal sound in response, and he waited for something more. Theo was right—there was something Claire wasn’t telling them. “Hello out there?” he said.

“I have to go,” she said. “Two tickets at Will Call under your name. Give Adelaide a kiss for me.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Did I say a kiss?” she asked, mischievously. “I just meant tell her hello.”

He didn’t even consider inviting Theo to the performance, and though
he did think of Eloise, taking his aunt would mean Theo knew he was going. He didn’t want to invite commentary. He felt self-conscious
enough already. Ben’s wife was hugely pregnant and didn’t like her husband going out at night, so Josh called Noah, who’d said at the party that he wanted to hang out sometime, and who agreed to go on the condition that beforehand they go to Grammer’s, Noah’s favorite bar, the virtues of which occupied much of their preshow conversation. Before they went inside, Noah made Josh pause to admire the huge, lit-up leaded-glass window—imported from Germany in 1911, Noah said—and Josh realized how strongly the other man reminded him of Theo. It took him a few minutes to shake off the association, to relax in Noah’s company again. And, then, at the theater, almost as soon as they were settled in their seats, Noah unsettled him a second time.

“I have a confession to make,” he said. “I’ve been debating whether to tell you, but what the hell.” He smiled. “I know who you are.”

“Well, I hope so,” Josh said, though of course he knew exactly what Noah meant. “We’ve been hanging out all night.”

Noah, rightly, ignored this. “You were in Blind Robots! Man, I loved that band.”

“Yup,” Josh said.

“You guys were awesome!”

“Thanks,” he said. He was flattered. He would have admitted, under interrogation, that he enjoyed being recognized. But he didn’t want to rehash old triumphs tonight. Or maybe he did. The day at work had left him feeling decidedly unawesome. He might benefit from a little ego boost.

“Can I ask you something?”

Josh braced himself and said a wary okay.