The Rules of Inheritance (32 page)

 

Colin and I don't have any friends in common. I sneak glances at him as he talks. His eyelashes are surprisingly long and his lips are full. He keeps his hands steady around his glass as he speaks, and he takes short, deliberate sips from it. Everything about Colin is deliberate.

 

The bar is closing and I am drunk. We all are: me, Riley, Nathan, Colin, my manager, and the waiter he's been laughing with. I watch Lila stumble away from the piano. We all fall in against one another, traipsing back across the street to the café parking lot.

 

I stand next to my car, waving stupidly at everyone as they climb behind the wheels of their vehicles. Colin is getting into an old Porsche, and Lila drives a station wagon, probably her mom's. I turn to open the door of my old Saab, my hands clumsy on the handle. I sink down into the seat, turn the key in the ignition. I've never driven this drunk before. I watch everyone pull away, their taillights fading into the bend in the road. Finally I put my car in gear and ease my foot onto the gas pedal.

 

It is four in the morning and Atlanta's streets are empty. It is only a ten-minute drive home and I take the turns easily. The traffic lights sway in the cobalt sky, all of them a steady green. I turn up the volume on the stereo, light a cigarette, and crack open the sunroof.

 

Driving feels powerful and calming. I think about Colin's eyes, about the way his hands gripped his glass.

 

At home I pull quickly up the driveway, parking beneath a fat clump of wisteria scenting the night air. Inside I walk mutely past my mother's desk. She's been gone for four months, but my father and I still haven't touched her things.

 

I glance at the purse still on her desk and I imagine the smell of its interior, one of waxy lipstick and cottony tissues. Mail still arrives for her, and we even get the occasional phone call from someone who doesn't know she is gone. A few weeks after she died I found a jewelry box in the bathroom. It was full of her hair that had fallen out during chemo.

 

In my room I fall across the bed, not bothering to undress. The room is spinning and it takes all my energy to sit up again, to click off the light.

 

I can't fall asleep so I lie there staring up at the ceiling. A smattering of old glow-in-the-dark stickers that I glued up there in tenth grade remains, and for a long time I just watch them come in and out of focus.

 

I think about how sometimes when my mother had too much to drink she'd want to come down here with me.

 

Let's look at the stars and talk, she'd say, her voice pleasantly slurred.

 

What do you want to talk about?

 

Oh, whatever. You. Boys. School.

 

I was slow to open up to her though.

 

Trust me, honey, she would say.

 

I would tell her little things. About my classes or my boyfriend. We talked about what it will be like when I go off to college. I told her that I was nervous.

 

Oh, honey, she said once, leaning up on one elbow. You're going to be fine. You're so much more together than I ever was. You're so smart. So self-aware.

 

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to trust her.

 

Smart and self-aware are the last things I feel right now.

 

This isn't what she would have wanted for me. The drinking and the café, the unmade bed and the thick heavy depression that has settled over both my father and me. She wouldn't have stood for any of it. Tears run down the sides of my face but I am too drunk to wipe them away.

 

By the time dawn seeps through the shutters I am unconscious.

I WAKE PAST NOON, push back the covers, and make my way upstairs. My father has left the coffee pot on for me and he is sitting at the dining room table, bills and paperwork spread out around him.

 

Rough night?

 

I nod. Yeah, a little.

 

We are still figuring out how to be with each other. For eighteen years my mother was the epicenter of our family, my father and I orbiting her like distant planets, never quite lining up enough to actually be in each other's view.

 

Now that she is gone there is a gaping chasm between us. It's not just that he is seventy-five and I am eighteen. It's more that we have no experience of being me and him. Every move we make is new territory; we are still drawing the map of us.

 

Years from now, after he is gone, I'll watch an old home movie that takes place on Christmas morning when I am only four years old. In the movie I throw myself frantically at my mother's feet as she ignores me, marveling over a gift she is opening. My father scoops me up, smoothing the hair back from my forehead and distracting me by singing to me in his funny, warbling voice.

 

I'll weep for how well he knew me, even though I thought the opposite for many years.

 

Most nights I linger on the couch with him after dinner, watching the news or flipping through movie channels. He drinks scotch from a tumbler, and I pour myself glasses of wine from a bottle in the fridge. We smoke cigarettes until there is a filmy haze hanging over our heads, until we are too sleepy or too bored to light another one.

 

I've been avoiding my high school friends, uncomfortable in their presence. Since my mother's death I have felt as though we were on separate planes of existence. No matter how hard my friends try to engage me I am no longer the girl they once knew. All the more reason why I find myself drawn to Colin.

 

On the nights I stay home my dad tells me about my mother, about when they first met. He also talks about World War II—long, drawn-out stories that make my attention wander. I fade in and out to the subject of fighter planes and prison camps.

 

My mother never had any patience for his stories about the war. Because of this I've always assumed his stories were boring, but the more I listen, the more I realize they are not.

 

They are, in fact, incredible. As is the way he tells them.

 

My father leans back in his chair, a glass in his hand, and really settles in for it, unwinding each tale as though it is a cord of rope. He begins with the day and the year, the weather, his age. He fills in as many details as possible until the image of him at age twenty-four, standing in a base camp in Italy before a giant, gleaming B-24 Liberator, is swimming in the room before us, like some great conjured-up hologram.

 

It must be like writing, I think. The way he tells these stories, the way he seems to unearth them from his being. I feel the same when I write out a new poem or begin the first gray sentences of a story.

 

Some nights I can't sleep, and after lying awake on the mattress in my room, listening to the ticks of the darkness around me, I go upstairs to my father's room and push the door open softly. He is asleep on his back, the covers pulled up neatly across his chest. He sleeps in the guest room now.

 

Dad, I say into the darkness. He is snoring softly.

 

Dad?

 

Huh? He wakes with a start.

 

Dad, it's me.

 

What's wrong, honey?

 

I can't sleep, Dad.

 

He pats the bed beside him. Come sit down.

 

I'm crying before I even cross the threshold. I sink down next to him, and he pushes himself back, props himself up, until he's sitting. He rubs my back as I cry.

 

It's okay, sweetie, he says. And we sit like that for a long time. Until the darkness has become an old, familiar thing again.

 

After a while, when I can speak, I say the things I've been most afraid to say. Here in my father's room at two in the morning, it feels like he is the only person who will ever hear them.

 

I wish I could have been a better daughter.

 

My dad shakes his head, starts to speak, but I cut him off.

 

I wish I could have been more loving. I wish I had told her how much I loved her.

 

The words take flight, like tiny birds escaping from the room.

 

My dad shakes his head again.

 

Do you remember when she came up to Marlboro for parents' weekend?

 

I nod feebly at him.

 

She came back and she was so damned happy and proud of you and what you're doing. I'll never forget her coming off that plane and saying, “Gerry, I got in that car, left the college, started driving through Massachusetts, and it was a beautiful fall day and the leaves were turning colors. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. There was a Russian opera on the radio, one of my favorites.” She said, “I was so happy with Claire being in that school and having friends like that. I was conducting the orchestra with one hand and driving with the other.”

 

It was a very important day for her. And it meant a lot to her, and it meant a lot to me, because I knew it was just going to be rougher than hell following that.

 

I listen as he talks, but I'm crying again.

 

I didn't know, I say. I didn't really think she was going to die. I would have been a better daughter.

 

The words burble forth.

 

My father sighs. She didn't want me to tell.

 

I would've been more loving. I didn't understand.

 

I know. But she didn't want you to have that burden. She wanted you to leave the nest and go to college.

 

But I didn't anyway.

 

Didn't what?

 

I didn't leave. I came home after she died.

 

I know, but she didn't want you to go off to college worrying about her or not go to college at all because of her, and I think maybe she also knew that she was going to be a mess, and she didn't want you to feel that you were any part of it, responsible for it in any way. You had nothing to do with that. You didn't do anything—

 

I wasn't even there when she died.

 

I know you weren't, but you know what? She was so damned proud of you. It meant so much to her and her life to have had you. I mean you were the biggest thing that ever happened to her.

 

Just think if she'd never had you, if we hadn't met and married, if she'd never had a child and had this cancer and died . . . She'd have had no one. Instead she had loving you and all the years I gave her, which were a hell of a lot better than had she stayed there, in New York, dating all those guys and living in that damned apartment building by herself. And she would've done that.

 

You're better off to have the eighteen years so far and what you've got to go, you know? Love what you've got. Love what you've had. Think back and enjoy the past as you go ahead today, tomorrow. That's what the world is here for, why we're all here.

 

He presses a little blue pill into my hand after that. Here, take this, he says.

 

I don't know what it is. Xanax maybe. I swallow it with water from the glass on his nightstand and go back downstairs to my room, to sleep.

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH ALCOHOL deepens by the day. That cool, clear fluid in my veins loosens and numbs me. It opens me up, let's me feel what I spend most days pushing away.