The Rules of Inheritance (6 page)

 

I can't breathe, I say. But I'm only about three hours away. I'll be there soon.

 

My father tells me to take my time. He says that everything will be fine. He is at the hospital with my mom. She is still unconscious. He wants me to breathe. He wants me to rest. He wants me to be safe.

 

Can you stay the night, he asks?

 

You can see your mother in the morning, he says.

 

These are all the things I'm hoping he'll say.

 

Guilt reaches its fingers through my rib cage, massages my heart.
Pound, pound, skip.

 

I stay in the coffee shop parking lot and lean against the hood of the car as I wait for Christopher. It's cold and I'm shivering.

 

I watch him pull up and park. I haven't seen him in a month, and he stands in front of me for a beat. Inside we sit across from each other in a booth, order cups of coffee. We don't talk about my mom at all.

 

I don't know what it is about Christopher. I am powerless around him. I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of scaring him off. I stay still, make no sudden movements; I am careful with my sentences. I am always amazed that he is still sitting there.

 

I like his hands, his mouth, the way his eyelashes curl up slightly, making his eyes that much brighter. He runs his fingers through his hair, shakes his head at me.

 

Clar, he calls me. It's at once diminutive and affectionate.

 

We talk about Marlboro and about his job painting houses with his uncle. I like the way he holds his cigarette, clipped between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes are steady on me as I talk. For whole moments, everything feels normal. I keep very still.

 

Our cups have been refilled twice and are empty now.

 

And then he says it: You can stay at my uncle's tonight if you want.

 

I want.

 

This is the moment that I will come back to for years to come. Over and over, this moment. Me and Christopher in a coffee shop in New Jersey. Late January. Cold night. Three hours from DC.

 

This moment. It will play over and over and over, rendering me more powerless than Christopher ever did. My insides will tumble out onto the floor around me, a slick, hot mess of hate and regret, this very moment, me and Christopher in a coffee shop in New Jersey, the epicenter of it all.

 

I'll heave into myself, pulling at my skin, wishing over and over that I had shaken my head, that I'd said, Thank you, but no. That I had just walked away from this stupid boy who didn't give a shit about me. I will offer up anything—limbs, friends, jobs, even my father—for the chance to do it over again, to be able to get in my car and go to her.

 

But instead I nod yes at Christopher and follow him home to his uncle's house.

 

In his uncle's kitchen, Christopher takes two glasses out of the cupboard, pours them tall with vodka. He unscrews the cap from a bottle of orange juice, pours a tiny bit into each glass.

 

For color, he says with a smirk.

 

We sit down at the kitchen table. I take my glass, drink my vodka, keep still.

 

It's late when we stumble upstairs. I am drunk. The stairs creak under our feet. At the top we lean against the banister. I am swaying lightly.

 

G'night, Clar, he says.

 

Goodnight, Christopher.

 

He goes to a room on the left. I go to a room on the right.

 

Years later when I lie in bed at night, helpless against these memories, I'll want to scream and thrash out at myself, standing there at the top of those stairs.

 

Don't go in that room, I scream at her in my head. Stop, I scream.

 

But she doesn't stop. I don't stop.

 

Instead I walk into that room, some plain guest room in an unfamiliar house in New Jersey, and I strip down to my underwear and a T-shirt. I crawl beneath the sheets and I close my eyes to the blackness, to the room spinning around me.

 

Hours later, when I wake up, the room is dark, but a swath of yellow light has cut its way across the floor.

 

Christopher's uncle is standing in the doorway, the light from the hallway glowing behind him.

 

He is handing me the phone.

 

It is three in the morning.

 

I am still drunk.

 

My father's voice is there. Faraway, quiet, resigned.

 

I'm so sorry, honey, he says.

 

She's gone, he says.

 

My mother is dead.

1992, I'M FOURTEEN YEARS OLD.

I
'M STANDING IN the cosmetics aisle of the local Kmart, holding two bottles of nail polish, trying to decide which one to steal. One is a bright berry color that makes the insides of my cheeks smart with flavor, and the other is a deep plum that makes me think of a pair of my mother's suede high heels.

 

I decide on the berry.

 

I take one more look around, at the empty aisles surrounding me, and then quickly tuck the bottle into the pocket of my jean shorts, feeling a soft thwack as it clicks against a matching tube of lipstick already hidden there.

 

I tug at the hem of my shirt, hoping it covers the bulge in my pocket, and my heart zings with a familiar burst I've grown to crave. Years later I'll recognize this thrill as the same one I receive upon the first drag of a longed-for cigarette or when that second drink takes me just over the edge from sobriety.

 

As I walk toward the entrance of the store I keep my head down. I'm hoping to appear disappointed, as if I haven't found what I'm looking for. Out of the corner of my eye I take note of the lone cashier, a bored-seeming woman in her twenties. She is picking at her fluorescent orange fingernails, oblivious to my presence.

 

I slip through the doors and as the warm, Florida air hits my air-conditioning-cooled skin, I feel an immediate sense of relief followed by another zing of excitement.

 

I've gotten away with it.

 

I walk back across the parking lot, to my parents' restaurant, thinking about this whole stealing thing. I'm not really sure how it started or how it's gotten so out of control. In the beginning it was just a pack of gum or a pen, but lately the items have been exclusively cosmetics, ten to fifteen dollars' worth at a time.

 

I slip through the door of my mother's catering shop, which has recently morphed into a café. It sits in a string of other shops, catty-corner from the Kmart. My mom is in the kitchen, her hands deep in a bowl of homemade pâté, and my father is in the office, perusing wine catalogs. The gamy scent of the goose liver my mother is working with is heady in the air.

 

I lean against the counter, next to my mother.

 

Hi, sweetie, she says with a smile. Did you finish your homework?

 

Yup.

 

This is a lie. I haven't even touched it. I am failing math and just this afternoon I had to stay after with Mr. Gorin. He smells like pimentos and cream cheese and some kind of musky aftershave, but he is kind and patient with me.

 

Did your dad help? My mother blows an errant wisp of hair out of her face as she asks this.

 

I nod again.

 

It's true, my dad did help. Or at least he tried. My dad is a former engineer, and math is a love of his. But he is not as patient as Mr. Gorin.

 

Now, come on, Claire, my father implored as we sat behind his desk in the back office. If 5
x
—4= 26, what does
x
equal?

 

I have no idea.

 

I hate math.

 

I hate
x
.

 

That was when I dropped my pencil on the desk and pushed back my chair, the urge to go across to Kmart popping into my head. My father called after me halfheartedly as I headed for the door, but I knew that he wouldn't mention it to my mother for fear of her scolding him.

 

Great, my mother replies now. It makes your father feel good to be able to help you, you know?

 

I nod.

 

Sweetie, she says then, can you tuck my hair behind my ears?

 

I smile at her and lean forward. My mother holds her pâté-covered hands out to the sides, and I carefully push her thick, blond hair away from her face. She is a beautiful woman, tall and slender, with a curtain of naturally white-blond hair that hangs perfectly to her shoulders. She has an easy smile and sparkling green eyes. I sometimes think that she is like a grown-up Sweet Valley High twin. Except weirder.

 

My mother is a chef. Before she met my father she worked as a food stylist in New York, arranging platters of sandwiches and heaping bowls of pudding to look appealing for commercials and print advertisements. Her portfolio, which now leans against a wall in the garage, is full of photos of raw Sara Lee turkey breasts hand-painted to look cooked and shrimp cocktail arranged like little bouquets in cut-glass dishes. She throws lavish dinner parties on a regular basis and obsesses over restaurants and menus.

 

During my parents' honeymoon through Europe, my mother kept a diary—not of what it felt like to be a newlywed but, instead, of the meals she and my father consumed. She wrote about bottles of wine drunk in Italy, cheeses devoured in France, and hangover remedies in Ireland (“very runny eggs and a pint of Guinness”).

 

About a year ago, at the urging of friends, she started a catering business. At first it was just kind of for fun, something my father and I helped with, each of us carefully removing trays of mini quiche and sautéed mushrooms from the backseat of the Volvo. But then she and my father rented a space, broke down some walls, ushered in the commercial appliances, and now our little family runs a full-blown restaurant. My father is in charge of the wine, my mother the food, and I usually stand behind the cash register fiddling with buttons and doodling in a notebook.

 

You know, my mother says, her hands back in the pâté, her hair tucked behind her ears, your father is going to be just fine.

 

I know, I say, nodding. I was hoping she wouldn't bring this up.

 

We are
all
going to be fine, she continues. Her voice is tight, measured. Even at fourteen I know it is not just me she is trying to convince.

 

Two weeks ago my parents told me that my father has cancer. They used their serious voices to explain what prostate cancer is, how he will have an operation and then some radiation. Then they made jokes I didn't get about my father getting heat flashes from hormone treatments.

 

He's going to be just fine, my mother said that day too.

 

She says it one more teeth-clenching time right now, and I just nod at her, idly fingering the bottle of nail polish in my pocket.

MY FATHER IS SEVENTY-ONE years old.

 

Most people assume he is my grandfather, and I don't bother to correct them anymore. Sometimes he makes a game of it. When some old lady in a diner approaches us, asking, Oh, is that your granddaughter? my father will lean back in his chair and chuckle.

 

Nope, he'll say. She's my grandson's aunt.

 

We smirk at each other across the table as we watch her try to puzzle it out.

 

He was fifty-seven when I was born. My mother was forty.

 

My father, Gerald Robert Smith, was born in 1920 in Michigan. One of four children, he picked blackberries in the summer, delivered newspapers growing up, and enlisted in the air force the day after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

 

He was trained as a fighter pilot, flew B-24s over Europe, dropping bombs on Germany. His plane was shot down in 1944 and my father was captured and taken to a German prison camp for the last six months of the war.

 

Although he likes to talk about the war, I find it impossible to follow along. War is a two-dimensional concept to me—a few pages in a history book read aloud in a class I don't want to be in.