Commonwealth

3

On the day before Bert and his soon-to-be second wife, Beverly, were to drive from California to Virginia, Bert came by the house in Torrance and suggested to his first wife, Teresa, that she should think about moving with them.

“Not with us, of course,” Bert said. “You’d have to pack, sell the house. I know it would take some time, but when you think about it why shouldn’t you come back to Virginia?”

Teresa had once thought her husband to be the handsomest man in the world, when in fact he looked like one of those gargoyles perched on a high corner of Notre Dame that’s meant to scare the devil away. She didn’t say this but it was clear by his change of tone that the thought was written on her face.

“Look,” Bert said, “you never wanted to move to Los Angeles anyway. You only did it for me, and not, if I may remind you, without a great deal of bitching. Why would you want to stay here now? Take the kids back to your parents’ place, get them started in school, and then when the time is right I can help you find a house.”

Teresa stood in the kitchen they had so recently shared and tightened the belt of her bathrobe. Cal was in second grade and Holly had started kindergarten, but Jeanette and Albie were still home. The children were hanging on Bert’s legs, squealing like he was a ride at Disneyland, Daddeee! Daddeee! He patted their heads like drums. He patted them with a beat.

“Why do you want me in Virginia?” she asked. She knew why but she wanted to hear him say it.

“It would be better,” he said, and shot his eyes down to those dear tousled heads, one beneath each hand.

“Better for the children if both of their parents lived near each other? Better for the children to not grow up without a father?”

“Christ, Teresa, you’re from Virginia. It’s not like I’m suggesting you move to Hawaii. Your entire family is there. You’d be happier there.”

“I’m touched to hear you’re thinking about my happiness.”

Bert sighed. She was wasting his time. She’d never had any respect for his time. “Everyone else is moving forward except for you. You’re the one who’s determined to stay stuck.”

Teresa poured herself a cup of coffee from the percolator. She offered one to Bert, who waved her away. “Are you asking Beverly’s husband to come with you too? So he could see more of his girls? It would be better for them that way.” Teresa had been told by a mutual friend that the reason Bert and the soon-to-be second Mrs. Cousins were moving back to Virginia was that Bert was afraid the new wife’s first husband would try to have him killed, that he would find a way to make it look like an accident and so never be caught. The first husband was a cop. Cops, some of them anyway, were good at things like that.

It was a brief conversation which ended in Bert’s being demonstrably irritated with her in the way he was always irritated with her, but that was all it took for Teresa Cousins to spend the rest of her life in Los Angeles.

Teresa had gotten a job in the secretarial pool at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. She put the two little ones into day care and the two older ones into an after-school program. The lawyers in the DA’s office had a small, collective sense of guilt about having covered for Bert during his long affair. They thought they owed Teresa a break now that he was gone and so they offered her the job. But it wasn’t too long before they were talking to her about going to night school and becoming a paralegal. Teresa Cousins was exhausted, angry, and misused, but they had come to find out she was no dummy.

Bert Cousins had made very little money as a deputy district attorney, and so he had been obliged to pay only a modest alimony and child support. His parents’ wealth was not his wealth and therefore did not figure into the settlement. He petitioned for custody of his children for the entire summer, from school’s end to school’s start, and his petition was granted. Teresa Cousins had fought hard to give him only two weeks, but Bert was a lawyer and his friends were lawyers who were friends with the judge, and his parents sent him enough money on the side to keep the case in court for all eternity if that was what the situation required.

When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn’t just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation. She loved her children, there was no doubt about that, but she could see that one season out of four spent without having to deal with every sore throat and fistfight, the begging for ballet classes she couldn’t afford and didn’t have the time to drive to, the constant excuses made at work for being late and leaving early when she was just hanging on by a fingernail anyway, one season every year without her children, though she would never admit it, might be manageable. The thought of a Saturday morning without Albie jumping over her in the bed, back and forth and back and forth like he was skiing some imaginary slalom course, was not unappealing. The thought of him jumping over Bert’s second wife, who no doubt slept in a cream silk negligee trimmed in black lace, a nightgown that had to be dry-cleaned, the thought of Albie actually jumping on her, well, that would be just fine.

For the first few years the children were too young to travel alone and so arrangements were made for their supervision. One year Beverly’s mother flew them out, the next year it was Beverly’s sister. Bonnie was anguished and apologetic in front of Teresa, never exactly able to meet her gaze. Bonnie had married a priest and was capable of experiencing guilt about all sorts of things over which she had no control. Another year it was Beverly’s friend Wallis who played chaperone. Wallis had a loud voice and a big smile for all of them. She wore a bright-green cotton dress. Wallis liked children.

“Oh, kiddos,” she’d said to the four little Cousinses. “We’re going to eat every peanut on the plane.” Wallis acted like she just happened to be flying to Virginia herself that day, and wouldn’t it be fun if she and the children could all sit together? Wallis had made it so easy that Teresa didn’t even think to cry until she returned to the house alone.

It was one of Teresa’s people who accompanied the children on the return flight: one year her mother, another year her favorite cousin. Bert would buy a ticket for anyone willing to brave six hours on a plane with his children.

But in 1971 it was decided that the children were old enough to go it alone, or that Cal at twelve and Holly at ten were old enough to wrangle Jeanette, who at eight needed absolutely nothing, and Albie, who at six needed everything in the world. At the airport, Teresa handed over the tickets Bert had sent and put her children on the plane to Virginia without suitcases, a bold maneuver she would never have attempted when Bonnie or Wallis was on duty. Let Bert hit the ground running, she thought. They needed everything: he could start with toothbrushes and pajamas and work his way up. She gave a letter to Holly to give to her father. All four of the children needed to have their teeth cleaned. Jeanette, she knew, had cavities. She sent copies of their immunization records, putting a check mark beside all the boosters that were due. She couldn’t keep taking off work to run to doctor’s appointments. The doctors were always late, and sometimes it was hours before she made it back to the office. The second Mrs. Bert Cousins didn’t have a job. There would be plenty of time for her to take the children shopping, to take them to doctors. Holly fainted whenever she had a shot. Albie bit the nurse. Cal refused to get out of the car. She had wrestled with him but he had braced a foot against either side of the car door and wouldn’t get out and so they missed his last booster. She wasn’t sure if Jeanette had had her shots or not because she couldn’t find Jeanette’s immunization records. She made note of all of this in the letter. Beverly Cousins wanted her family? Have at it.

The children were seated across the aisle from one another, the boys on the left and the girls on the right, and each was given a set of junior airman wings, which only Cal refused to wear. They were glad to be on the plane, glad to be free of direct supervision for six hours. As much as they hated to leave their mother — they were unquestionably loyal to their mother — the four Cousins children thought of themselves as Virginians, even the youngest two, who had been born after the family’s move west. All of the Cousins children hated California. They were sick of being shoved down the hallways of the Torrance Unified School District. They were sick of the bus that picked them up on the corner every morning, and sick of the bus driver who would not cut them a break, even thirty seconds, if they were made late by Albie’s dawdling. They were sick of their mother, no matter how much they loved her, because she had on occasion cried when they returned to the house after missing the bus. Now she would be late for work. She went over it all again in the car as she drove them to school at terrifying speeds — she had to work, they couldn’t live on what their father gave them, she couldn’t afford to lose this job just because they weren’t responsible enough to walk to the goddamn corner on time. They blocked her out by pinching Albie, whose screams filled the car like mustard gas. More than anything they were sick of Albie, who had spilled his Coke all over the place and was at this very moment kicking the seat in front of him on the plane. Everything that happened was his fault. But they were sick of Cal too. He got to wear the house key on a dirty string around his neck because their mother told him it was his job to get everybody home after school and make them a snack. Cal was sick of doing it, and on most days he locked his sisters and brother out for at least an hour so that he could watch the television shows that he wanted to watch and clear his head. There was a hose on the side of the house and shade beneath the carport. It wasn’t like they were going to die. When their mother came home from work they met her at the door screaming about the tyranny of their situation. They lied about having done their homework, except for Holly, who always did her homework, sometimes sitting Indian-style under the carport with her books in her lap, because she lived for the positive reinforcement her teachers heaped on her. They were sick of Holly and the superiority of her good grades. Really, the only person they weren’t sick of was Jeanette, and that was because they never thought about her. She had retreated into a silence that any parent would have asked a teacher or a pediatrician about had they noticed it, but no one noticed. Jeanette was sick of that.

They reclined their seats as far back as they could go. They asked for playing cards and ginger ale. They reveled in the sanctuary of an airplane which was for the time being neither in California nor Virginia, the only two places they had ever been in their lives.

Fix would take his week’s vacation to be with Caroline and Franny when they went to California in the summer, whereas when Bert’s children arrived in Virginia, Bert told Beverly his caseload at work had mysteriously doubled. Bert worked in estates and trusts law in Arlington, having decided the life of an assistant district attorney was too stressful. It was difficult to imagine how so many people needed new wills drawn up on the very day his children arrived. He sent her to the airport alone in the station wagon. He had thought that he was going to be able to pick them up himself but at the last possible minute a motion that no one was expecting had been filed, and not only could he not get to the airport, it really didn’t look like he was going to make it home for dinner. Beverly had picked Bert’s children up at the airport before, but in reality she had been going to pick up her mother or Bonnie or Wallis who had kindly agreed to come and visit her on a free ticket. It had been such a joy to see any one of them getting off the plane that she could very nearly overlook the children. She would lock arms with her mother or sister or dearest friend and together they would shepherd the lambs through baggage claim and out to the parking garage. It had been something to look forward to.

But now Beverly felt oddly paralyzed as she waited at the end of the jet bridge alone. When all the other passengers had disembarked, the stewardess brought the Cousins children out and she signed for them. Four little stair-steps, boy-girl-girl-boy, each one a glassy-eyed refugee. The girls gave her a disappointed hug at the gate while the boys hung back, walking behind her to baggage claim. Albie was singing some indecipherable song, possibly Cal was too, though she wasn’t sure, they stayed so far away from her. The airport was noisy and crowded with happy families reunited. It was hard enough to hear herself think.

They waited at the baggage carousel and watched the bags rotate past. “How did the school year turn out? Did you make good grades?” Beverly launched the question to the group but the only one who looked at her was Holly. Holly made A’s in every class except for reading and there she’d made an A-plus. Beverly asked if the weather had been good when they left Los Angeles, if they’d eaten on the plane, if it had been a good flight. Holly answered everything.

“The flight was delayed thirty minutes out of the gate because of traffic on the runway. We were twenty-sixth in line for takeoff,” she said, her little chin lifted up, “but we had a good tailwind and the pilot was able to make up most of the time in the air.” The part that divided her pigtails was wildly uneven, as if it had been made by a drunken finger rather than a comb.

The boys had wandered off in opposite directions. For a second she caught sight of Cal standing on the conveyor belt of a luggage carousel three carousels away, gliding by with the bags from Houston. No sooner had she seen him than he hopped off to avoid the charge of an oncoming skycap.

“Cal!” Beverly called out over the crowd. She couldn’t yell at him, not publicly, not at a distance, and so she said, “Go get your brother!” But Cal looked back at her as if it were some weird coincidence that his name was Cal and this complete stranger had said something to someone who was also named Cal. He turned away. Jeanette stood just beside her, looking at the strap of her little shoulder bag, staring at it. Had anyone had this child tested?

Finally, every last bag from the nonstop TWA flight from Los Angeles to Dulles had slid onto the conveyor belt and been pulled away by the waiting travelers. There was nothing left to claim. The crowd dispersed and she caught sight of Albie trying to pry an ancient piece of chewing gum off the floor with what from a distance almost looked like a knife. She turned away.

“Okay,” she said, calculating the time of day and the traffic back to Arlington. “I guess the bags didn’t make the flight. That’s not a problem. We’ll just have to go to the office and fill out some paperwork. Did you keep the claim checks?” she said to Holly. Best to just direct everything to Holly, who seemed to have a natural desire to please. Holly was her only real chance.

“We don’t have any claim checks,” Holly said. She had very pale skin and dark straight hair, a face full of freckles. She had the kind of Pippi Longstocking looks adults found charming and other kids made fun of.

“But you had them at some point. Didn’t your mother give you the claim checks?”

Holly started again. “We don’t have any claim checks because we don’t have any luggage.”

“What do you mean you don’t have any luggage?”

“I mean we don’t have any.” Holly didn’t see how she could be any clearer than that.

“You mean you forgot it in Los Angeles? You lost it?” Beverly was distracted. She was looking for Cal and didn’t see him. There were signs every ten feet warning people not to sit or stand on the carousels.

Holly’s lip trembled slightly but her stepmother failed to notice. Holly had thought there was something fishy about taking a trip without bags, but her mother had assured her this was the way their father wanted it. He wanted them to have everything new — new clothes, new toys, new bags in which to carry home the loot. Maybe he’d just forgotten to tell Beverly. “We didn’t bring any,” she said quietly.

Beverly looked down at her. Goddamn Bert for saying she could manage this no problem. “What?”

It was terrible to have been made to say it once, unforgivable to be made to say it again. Tears welled up in Holly’s eyes and started their run across the freckles. “We. Don’t. Have. Any. Luggage.” Now she would be in trouble with her father and she hadn’t even seen her father yet. What was worse, her father would be mad at her mother again. Her father had been calling her mother irresponsible forever but she wasn’t.

Beverly’s eyes shot from one end of the baggage claim to the other. The passengers and the people who had met them were thinning out, two of her stepchildren were missing, the third stepchild was crying and the fourth was so consumed by the vinyl strap of her handbag it was hard not to assume she was handicapped. “Then why have we been standing at the baggage carousel for the last half hour?” Beverly didn’t raise her voice. She wasn’t mad yet. She’d be mad later when she had time to think about it but for now she simply didn’t understand.

“I don’t know!” Holly screamed, her eyes streaming. She pulled up the hem of her T-shirt and wiped it across her nose. “It’s not my fault. You brought us down here. I never said we had luggage.”

Jeanette unzipped the zipper on her little purse, dug around, and handed her sister a tissue.

Every year Beverly’s second trip to the airport was worse because she always thought it was going to be better. She left her four step-children at home (first with her mother, then Bonnie, then Wallis, and now under Cal’s supervision. They stayed home alone in Torrance after all, and Arlington was safer than Torrance) and drove back to Dulles to reclaim her girls. While Bert’s children came east for the entire summer, Caroline and Franny traveled west for two short weeks: one with Fix and then one with her parents, just enough time to remind the girls how greatly they preferred California to Virginia. They shuffled off the plane looking like they were in an advanced state of dehydration from having cried for the entirety of their flight. Beverly dropped to her knees to hug them but they were nothing but ghosts. Caroline wanted to live with her father. She begged for it, she pleaded, and year after year she was denied. Caroline’s hatred for her mother radiated through the cloth of her pink camp shirt as her mother pressed Caroline to her chest. Franny on the other hand simply stood there and tolerated the embrace. She didn’t know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.

Beverly kissed their heads. She kissed Caroline again as Caroline pulled away from her. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she said.

But Caroline and Franny were not glad they were home. They were not glad at all. It was in this battered state that the Keating girls returned to Arlington to be reunited with their stepsiblings.

Holly was certainly friendly. She hopped up and down and actually clapped her hands when the girls came through the door. She said she wanted to put on another dance recital in the living room this summer. But Holly was also wearing Caroline’s red T-shirt with the tiny white ribbon rosette at the neck, which her mother had made Caroline put in the Goodwill bag before she left because it was both faded and too small. Holly was not the Goodwill.

Caroline had the bigger room with two sets of bunk beds, and Franny, being smaller, had the smaller room with twin beds. The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side. Two girls and one bathroom was a workable situation from the beginning of September through the end of May, but in June when Caroline and Franny returned from California they found Holly and Jeanette had made themselves at home in one set of bunk beds while Franny had lost her room completely to the boys. It was four girls in one room and the two boys in the other with a bathroom the size of a phone booth for the six of them to share.

Caroline and Franny lugged their luggage up the stairs. Luggage: that which is to be lugged. They passed the open door of the master bedroom where Cal was lying across their mother’s bed, his dirty feet in dirty socks resting on the pillows, watching a tennis match at top volume. They were never allowed to go into the master bedroom or sit on the bed, even if they kept their feet on the floor, nor were they allowed to watch television without an express invitation. Cal didn’t lift his eyes from the screen or give the smallest recognition of their arrival as they passed.

Holly was behind them, close enough to bump when they stopped walking. “I was thinking that all four of us could dance in white nightgowns. Would that be okay? We could start practicing this afternoon. I’ve got some ideas about the choreography if you want to see.”

As for there being four girls in the dance recital, only three were in evidence. Jeanette was MIA. No one had noticed she was gone, but Franny’s cat Buttercup was missing as well. Buttercup had not come to the door to greet Franny as surely she would have after two weeks away. Buttercup, the lifeline to normalcy, was gone. Beverly, drowning in the sea of child-life, had no clear memory of the last time she’d seen the cat, but Franny’s sudden, paralyzing sobs prompted her to do a thorough search of the house. Beverly found Jeanette beneath a comforter on the floor in the back of the linen closet (how long had Jeanette been missing?). She was petting the sleeping cat.

“She can’t have my cat!” Franny cried, and Beverly leaned down and took the cat from Jeanette, who hung on for only half a second and then let go. The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtrack”:

Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom.

When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only “boom” in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old. She meant to ignore him but after a while he proved too much for her. When finally she snapped, screaming “Stop that!” he only looked at her. He had the most enormous brown eyes, and loose, loopy brown curls that made him look like a cartoon animal.

“I’m serious,” she said, making an effort to steady her breathing. “You have to stop that.” She tried to find within her own voice a sound that was reasonable, parental, but when she turned to walk away she heard the small, quiet chug, “Boom chicka-boom.”

Beverly thought about killing him. She thought about killing a child. Her hands were shaking. She went to her room, wanting to close the door and lock it and go to sleep, but from the hallway she heard the thwack of a tennis ball, the roar of a crowd. She stuck her head around the doorframe. “Cal?” she said, trying not to cry. “I need my room now.”

Cal didn’t move, not a twitch. He kept his eyes on the screen. “It’s not over,” he said, as if she had never seen a tennis match before and didn’t understand that when the ball was in motion it meant the game was still going on.

Bert didn’t believe in television for children. At its most harmless he saw it as a waste of time, a bunch of noise. At its most harmful he wondered if it didn’t stunt brain development. He thought Teresa had made a huge mistake letting the children watch so much TV. He had told her not to do it but she never listened to him when it came to parenting, when it came to anything. That’s why he and Beverly had only one television in this house, and why it was in their bedroom, which wasn’t open to children, or wasn’t open to her children during the regular course of the year. Now Beverly wanted to unplug the television and cart it off to what the realtor had called “the family room,” though no member of the family ever seemed to light there. She went down the hallway, Albie following at a safe distance, churning his music. Did his mother teach him that? Someone taught him. Six-year-olds didn’t hang out in strip clubs, not even this one. Beverly went into the girls’ room but Holly was there reading Rebecca.

“Beverly, have you ever read Rebecca?” Holly asked as soon as Beverly stepped into the room, her little face bright, bright, bright. “Mrs. Danvers is scaring me to death but I’m going to keep reading it. I don’t care if I had the chance to live in Manderley. I wouldn’t stay there if someone was being that creepy to me.”

Beverly nodded slightly and backed out of the room. She thought about trying to lie down in the boys’ room, the room that had once been Franny’s, but it had a vaguely nutty smell reminiscent of socks and underwear and unwashed hair.

She went downstairs again and found Caroline banging around the kitchen in a rage, saying she was going to make brownies for her father and mail them to him so he’d have something to eat.

“Your father doesn’t like nuts in his brownies,” Beverly said. She didn’t know why she said it. She was trying to be helpful.

“He does too!” Caroline said, turning on her mother so fast she spilled half a bag of flour on the counter. “Maybe he didn’t when you knew him but you don’t know him anymore. Now he likes nuts in everything.”

Albie was in the dining room. She could hear him singing through the kitchen door. His single-pointed focus was astounding. Franny was in the living room, pulling the cat’s front legs through the armholes of a doll’s dress and crying so quietly that her mother was sure that every single thing she had ever done in her life up until that moment was a mistake.

There was no place to go, no place to get away from them, not even the linen closet because Jeanette hadn’t come out of the linen closet since surrendering the cat. Beverly took the car keys and went outside. The minute she closed the door behind her she was underwater, the summer air hot and solid in her lungs. She thought about the back patio of the house in Downey, how she would sit outside in the afternoons, Caroline on her tricycle, Franny happy in her lap, the smell of the orange blossoms nearly overwhelming. Fix had had to sell the house in order to pay her half of what little equity they had and make the child support. Why had she made him sell the house? No one could sit outside in Virginia. She got five new mosquito bites just walking to the driveway and each one puffed up to the size of a quarter. Beverly was allergic to mosquito bites.

It was easily 105 degrees inside the car. She started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, turned off the radio. She lay across the scorching green vinyl of the bench seat so that no one looking out the front window of the house could see her. She thought about the fact that if she were in the garage rather than the carport she’d be killing herself now.

Because California public schools ran slightly longer than Virginia Catholic schools, Beverly and Bert had had five days alone in the house between her children’s departure and his children’s arrival. One night after dinner they made love on the dining room carpet. It wasn’t comfortable. Beverly’s weight had steadily dropped since their move to Virginia, and the bony protrusions of her vertebrae and clavicles were so clearly displayed she could have found work in an anatomy class. Every thrust pushed her back a quarter inch, dragging her skin against the wool blend. But even with the rug burns it made them feel daring and passionate. It hadn’t been a mistake, Bert kept telling her as they lay on their backs afterwards, staring up at the ceiling. Beverly counted five places where the glass crystals on the chandelier were missing. She hadn’t noticed it before.

“Everything that’s happened in our lives up until now, everything we’ve done, it had to happen exactly the way it did so that we could be together.” Bert took her hand and squeezed it.

“You really believe that?” Beverly asked.

“We’re magic,” Bert said.

Later that night he rubbed Neosporin down the length of her spine. She slept on her stomach. That was their summer vacation.

Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: they did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The Cousinses did not prefer the company of Cousinses and the two Keatings could have done without each other entirely. The four girls were angry about being crowded together into a single room but they didn’t blame each other. The boys, who were always angry about everything, didn’t seem to care that they were in the company of so many girls. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.

The only one who was troubled by this fact was Franny, because Franny had always loved her mother. During the regular part of the year they sometimes took naps together in the afternoons after school, spooning so close they fell asleep and dreamed the same dreams. Franny would sit on the closed toilet lid in the morning and watch her mother put on makeup, and she would sit on the toilet lid again at night and talk to her mother while her mother soaked in the bath. Franny was secure in the knowledge that she was not only her mother’s favorite daughter, she was her mother’s favorite person. Except in the summer, when her mother looked at her as if she were nothing more than the fourth of six children. When her mother was sick of Albie, she announced that all children had to go outside, and “all children” included Franny. Ice cream had to be eaten outside. Watermelon — outside. Since when had she not been trusted to eat watermelon at the kitchen table? It was insulting, and not just to her. Maybe Albie couldn’t eat a dish of ice cream without dropping it on the floor but the rest of them were perfectly capable. They went outside all right. They went outside and slammed the door and took off down the street, loping across the hot pavement like a pack of feral dogs.

The four Cousins children didn’t blame Beverly for their miserable summers. They blamed their father, and would have said so to his face had he ever been around. Cal and Holly gave no indication that they thought Beverly’s behavior was inexcusable (and Jeanette never said anything anyway, and Albie, well, who knew about Albie), but Caroline and Franny were horrified. Their mother made everyone line up in the kitchen according to age and come to the stove with their plate instead of putting the food on the table in dishes as she did every other night of the year. In the summers they wandered out of the civilized world and into the early orphanage scenes of Oliver Twist.

It was a Thursday night in July when Bert called a family meeting in the living room and announced that in the morning they were going to Lake Anna. He told them he had taken the next day off from work and rented three rooms at the Pinecone Motel. On Sunday morning they would drive to Charlottesville to see his parents and then come home again. “It’s a vacation,” Bert said. “All arranged.”

The children blinked, vaguely stirred to think of a day that wasn’t going to be like all the other days, and Beverly blinked because Bert hadn’t mentioned any of this to her. The children could see Beverly trying to catch Bert’s eye but Bert’s eye could not be caught. A motel, a lake, meals in restaurants, a visit to Bert’s extremely unwelcoming parents who had horses and a pond and a fabulous black cook named Ernestine who had taught the girls how to make pies the summer before. If the children had been inclined to speak to the parents they might have said it sounded like fun, but they weren’t inclined, so they didn’t.

The next morning it was hot as a swamp. The birds stayed quiet in an effort to conserve their energy. Bert told the children to go and get in the car, though everyone knew it wasn’t as simple as that. First there would have to be an ugly fight over who had to sit with Albie and they all stood around in the driveway waiting for it. The front seat, which was restricted to parents, was never an option, even though Caroline and Franny rode there with their mother all the time in the regular parts of the year. That left the backseat, the way-back, and the way-way-back of the wagon. In the end, the children were always arranged in pairs by gender or age, which meant that either Cal or Jeanette got stuck with Albie, occasionally Franny, never Caroline or Holly. Albie would sing an impassioned version of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in which the numbers did not diminish sequentially — fifty-seven bottles, seventy-eight bottles, four, a hundred and four. He would talk about how he was going to be carsick and make convincing gagging noises that forced Bert to the shoulder of the interstate for no reason, although Jeanette inevitably threw up, never having said anything about it. At every exit sign Albie would ask if that was the exit they were supposed to take.

“Are we there yet?” he would say, then burst out laughing at the pleasure of it all. No one wanted to sit with Albie.

Just as they were starting to shove one another around the driveway, Bert came out carrying a canvas bag the size of a shoe box. Bert was a very light packer. “Cal,” he said. “You ride with your brother.”

“I rode with him last time,” Cal said. Whether or not this was true no one could say, and what constituted “last time” anyway? The last time in the car? The last time on a trip? They never took trips.

“So you’ll ride with him this time too.” Bert threw his bag in the back and swung the door shut.

Cal looked around. Albie was darting towards the girls, poking them lightly with his index finger and making them scream. All four of the girls blurred together in Cal’s mind: his own sisters, his stepsisters, it was hard to single out one of them to take the fall. Then Cal looked at Beverly, her purple striped T-shirt, her long yellow hair curled and brushed into stylish order, her sunglasses big as a movie star’s. “Make her,” he said to his father.

Bert looked at his oldest child and then his wife. “Make her what?”

“Make her ride with him. Make her sit in the way-back.”

Bert smacked Cal with his open hand. It made a sound but it was hardly a serious blow, it only glanced off the side of his head. Cal stumbled back to make it look worse than it was. He’d taken harder hits at school, and this one was worth it just to see what little color Beverly had drain out of her face. Cal could tell that for a split second she hadn’t known whose side Bert would be on, and she had seen herself riding all the way to Lake Anna in the backseat with Albie, and she had died. Bert said he was sick of all the horseshit. He told them to get in the car. And they did it, even Beverly, silently, and with grave bitterness.

On the road Bert kept the window down, his elbow pointing out towards the rolling hills, and said nothing. Three hours later when they got to the Arrowhead Diner he had everyone line up and count off, Cal being one, Caroline being two, Holly being three.

“We’re not the goddamn Trapp Family Singers,” Cal said under his breath.

Franny looked up at him with a mixture of fear and disbelief. He had taken the name of God in vain. That was a big one. “You can’t swear,” she said. Bert could swear, even though it was a bad idea, but children could never swear. She was sure of that. Even in the summer she was a Sacred Heart girl.

Cal, both the oldest and the tallest of all the children, put his right hand on the top of her head, and, curling his fingers down towards her ears, squeezed. It wasn’t as hard as he would have squeezed the head of one of his real sisters, but still, he maintained control.

Caroline, being the oldest of the girls, got to decide who would share beds at the Pinecone, and at dinner made the pronouncement that she would sleep with Holly. That meant Franny got Jeanette. Franny liked Jeanette. She liked Holly too as far as that was concerned, she just didn’t want to sleep with Caroline, who was not above trying to smother her with a pillow in the middle of the night. The boys got their own room, and each his own bed. At seven o’clock that night the parents began to fidget and yawn, and then announced that they were exhausted, it was bedtime, and there would be fun in the morning.

But what the children got in the morning was a note slipped under the door of the girls’ room. Have breakfast in the coffee shop. You can charge it. We’re sleeping late. Do not knock. It was their mother’s handwriting but the note was not signed Love or even Mommy. It wasn’t signed at all. One more document in the ever-growing mountain of evidence that they were on their own.

Every door in the long row of bright-blue doors at the Pinecone was closed and the drapes over every window were pulled together. The cars parked in front of the rooms were wet with dew, or maybe it had rained during the night. The girls stood outside and knocked on Cal’s door, the one to the right of theirs. Cal opened the door a crack. He kept the chain on and looked out at her with a single eye. “We’re going to breakfast,” Holly said. “Come or don’t come.”

Cal closed the door, took off the chain, and opened it again. Behind him they saw Albie sitting on his double bed watching cartoons, his feet rhythmically kicking the end of the mattress. Whenever any of the girls thought to complain that there were four of them in a room sharing two beds, they thought of Cal, sharing a room with Albie. Cal shared a room with Albie at home so maybe he was used to it but probably not.

“Let’s go,” Cal said.

Cal was built on his father’s model. He was a tan boy with tan hair, and in the summer both the boy and his hair took on an undertone of gold. Cal had blue eyes, his father’s eyes, while the other three had dark eyes like their mother. Albie may have looked a little bit like freckled Holly but Holly’s good sense and Albie’s lack of it scrubbed out any physical resemblance between them. All four of the children were thin but Jeanette was too thin to look like any of them. She was never described by her pretty face or by her hair, which was glossy and the color of dark honey. Jeanette was referenced only by her elbows and knees, which did, in fact, resemble doorknobs. When the six of them were together they looked more like a day camp than a family, random children dropped off on the same curb. There was very little evidence of their relation, even among those who were related by blood.

“They’ll sleep until noon,” Holly said, meaning the parents. In the diner she pushed her eggs around in circles with her fork.

“And when they do finally get up they’ll just tell us they have to take a nap,” Caroline said. It was true. The parents napped like febrile toddlers. All the children nodded their heads. Cal was next to the window in the booth and he turned away from the rest of them to stare at the road. Albie was pounding the bottom of a ketchup bottle with the flat of his palm until finally the ketchup poured out onto his pancakes.

“Jesus,” Cal said and snatched the bottle away. “Can’t you sit here without doing something disgusting?”

“Look,” Albie said, and held up the pancake, dripping ketchup, in front of his face.

Jeanette pinned her toast to her plate with two fingers and removed the crusts with a knife.

“I’m not just going to sit here all day waiting for them,” Caroline said.

“What else can we do?” Franny asked, because there wasn’t anything to do. See if the motel had any board games maybe? A deck of cards? It was still so early, just now seven o’clock, and the sun came through the window of the diner like an invitation delivered to their table on a silver tray. It would have been a good day to swim.

“We came here to go to the lake so we should go to the lake,” Caroline said, reading her sister’s mind, or half of it. She was wearing her swimsuit under her clothes. They all were. Caroline was a lot angrier than the rest of them. It was there in her voice all the time. Then again, it could have been that Cal was the angriest and his anger just manifested itself in different ways.

Jeanette lifted her eyes from her toast. “Let’s go,” she said. It was the first thing she had said since they left Arlington the day before and so that settled it. Why should they wait for the parents to wake up? When they did go out with the parents, the children were divided into two groups — the big kids: Cal, Caroline, and Holly; and the little kids — Jeanette, Franny, and Albie. The big kids were allowed to wander off, swim in deep water without life jackets, hike out past anyone’s view, and decide what they wanted for lunch. The little kids might as well have been tied to a tree and made to eat from a single dish. The little kids were never to be trusted. With no further discussion, the six of them decided it would be better to see this as an opportunity.

At the cash register they added a six-pack of Coke and twelve candy bars to their breakfast tab, enough to see them through to lunch if necessary.

“How far is it to the lake?” Holly asked the waitress who was ringing them up.

“Maybe two miles, a little less. You just get back on Route 98.”

“What if you walk?”

The waitress studied the children for a minute. So many of them looked to be exactly the same size. Franny and Jeanette were thirty-eight days apart in age. “Where’re your parents?”

“Getting dressed,” Caroline said in the voice of a bored child. “They want us all to walk together. They said it was going to be an adventure. We’re supposed to get directions.”

The other children beamed at her for lying so deftly. The waitress took a paper placemat off the stack and turned it over. “There’s a shortcut if you walk.” On one end of the placemat she drew a rectangle to represent the motel (which she labeled “P”) and on the other end a circle for the lake (“L”). The broken line she drew to connect the two was their ticket out.

In the parking lot, Cal tried all the doors to the locked station wagon. Franny asked him what he needed out of the car and he said, “Something. Mind your own business.” He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered in the window, trying to see whatever it was he wanted.

“I can break in,” Caroline said. “If it’s something you really need.”

“Liar,” Cal said, not bothering to look at her.

“I can,” she said and then she pointed at Jeanette. “Go get me a coat hanger out of the closet.”

It was true. Their father had shown them how that very summer. Their uncle Joe Mike had locked his keys in Aunt Bonnie’s car when they were all at their grandparents’ house that last weekend, and their father had unlocked the door with a coat hanger to save Joe Mike the twelve dollars it would have cost to call a locksmith. After that Fix had both girls practice because they were interested. He said it was a good thing to know.

“The mistake people make is that they think they’re supposed to pull up on something and you’re not, you push down,” he’d told them.

Caroline set about untwisting the wire hanger. That was the hardest part.

“You’re wasting time,” Cal said.

“Whose time?” Holly said. “If you’re in such a hurry then go.” She was curious, and it was plain to all of them that Cal was curious too.

Albie walked in wide circles around the car, swinging his hips from side to side and doing the boom-boom thing.

“Pipe down,” Cal said to him. “If you wake Dad up he’ll take your head off.” That was when the rest of them remembered whose room the car was parked in front of and made a point to be quiet.

Caroline picked back the rubber seal at the bottom of the window with her pointer finger and stuck the coat hanger in while the other children pressed close to watch. Caroline was a little worried that locks might be different from one car to another. The station wagon was an Oldsmobile and Aunt Bonnie’s car was something else, a Dodge maybe. The tip of her tongue pushed up at the corner of her mouth while she guided the coat hanger blindly towards what her father called the sweet spot about ten inches down from the button lock. Then she felt it, the wire against the mechanism of the lock. She didn’t try to hook it though the temptation was there. It was just a little bump and she pushed straight down the way she’d been taught.

The lock popped up.

It was a victory for all the girls that they remembered not to scream. Caroline pulled the coat hanger out and opened the door like it was some sort of natural act. Even Albie put his arms around her waist. “You broke the car!” he said, his loud whisper making him sound like a movie gangster.

“That’s right,” she said and gave him the hanger as the morning’s souvenir. Albie immediately went to the car next to theirs and began jamming the hanger down against the window. Oh, what Caroline wouldn’t have given to call her father from the motel phone! She wanted him to know what a good job she’d done.

Cal took the coat hanger from his brother and studied it in light of this new potential. “You can teach me how to do this?” he said, either to Caroline or the coat hanger.

“Only police officers are allowed to do it,” Franny said. “And their children. Otherwise you’re a criminal.”

“I’d be a criminal,” Cal said. He slid into the front seat of the station wagon, opened the glove compartment. He took out a gun and a fifth of gin, the seal still on.

No one was surprised that there was a gun in the car, even though Cal was the only one who’d known it was there, and he only knew about it because he’d been nosing around in the glove compartment a few days before while Beverly was in the grocery store and he’d found it, proving yet again that sometimes a person just has to look. What surprised all of them though, Cal included, was that Bert had left it in the car. It made them think he must have another gun in his motel room. Bert liked a gun in his briefcase, in the nightstand, in the drawer of his office desk. He liked to talk about the criminals he had put away, and how a person never knew, and how he had to protect his family, and how he wasn’t going to let the other guy make the first move, but really it was just that Bert liked guns.

The mesmerizing item was the gin. The parents might enjoy a drink every now and then but it wasn’t like they had to take it with them. They had never seen gin in the car before. That was something special.

“You know you can’t take it,” Holly said, looking back to the door of the parents’ room. She was talking about both the gun and the gin.

“Just in case something happens,” Cal said. He put the gun in the brown paper sack along with the candy bars and Cokes. Jeanette had taken her Coke and two candy bars out of the bag already and put them in her purse. She took the bottle from her brother and started working on the seal, teasing it loose so gently that it finally gave itself up to her little fingernails in a single, replaceable piece. She put the seal in her coin purse and gave the bottle back to her brother. Then they set out for the lake, Caroline carrying the map.

It was hotter than they expected it to be, though no hotter than it had been the day before or the day before that. The sky was already turning white, clamping a pervasive dullness onto the landscape. Holly scratched at her arms and complained about the mosquitoes. Like her stepmother, she was particularly sensitive to mosquitoes. The grass in the field across from the motel, the field that the waitress had told them to cut through, came up to their waists and was as high as Albie’s chest, but being right up in it they could see the tiny flecks of yellow flowers blooming on the stalks. “Can you see the lake?” Albie asked. He had ketchup smeared across the blue-and-yellow-striped shirt that Beverly had bought for him. His hands were sticky.

“Stop,” Cal said, and put up his hand flat to the sky. They stopped like soldiers, all at once. “Turn around,” he said, and they turned around.

“What’s that building right there?” Cal was talking to his brother, pointing just across the street.

“The Pinecone,” Albie said.

“How far did she say it was from the Pinecone to the lake?”

In the quiet they could hear the cars whizzing past. Deep in the grass the crickets rubbed their wings together, the birds called out overhead. “Two miles, maybe a little less,” Franny said. She knew it wasn’t her question to answer but she couldn’t stop herself. There was something about standing there that was making her uneasy, the dry weeds pricking at her shins. There was no path through the field.

Cal pointed at his brother. It was funny the way he could be so much like his father while being nothing like him at all. “Albie?”

“Two miles,” Albie said. He started chopping at the grass with his open hand, and then began swinging his arm back and forth like a scythe.

“So now you know we’re not there and you know I can’t see the lake.” Cal started walking again and the rest of them pushed ahead. The field was bigger than it had looked from a distance, and after a while they couldn’t see the Pinecone anymore and they couldn’t see anything else either, just the grass and the washed-out sky. Several members of the party wondered if they were still going in the right direction.

“Are we there now?” Albie said.

“Shut up,” Holly said. A grasshopper the size of a baby’s fist jumped up from the dry grass and attached itself to her shirt and she screamed. Franny and Jeanette moved to the left of the pack, and when they ducked down they were pretty sure no one could see them. They were very close, almost nose to nose, and Jeanette smiled at her before they popped back up again.

“Now are we there?” Albie hopped forward, both feet together, but his progress was thwarted by the density of the grass. He looked back at his brother. “Now are we there?”

Cal stopped again. “I can send you back.” He looked behind them. There was still the beaten-down vestige of the trail they had made in the grass.

“Where are we?” Albie asked.

“Virginia,” Cal said, his voice as tired as an adult’s. “Shut up.”

“I want to carry the gun,” Albie said.

“People in hell want ice water,” Caroline said. It was an expression of her father’s.

“Cal’s got a gun,” Albie sang, his voice surprisingly loud in the open landscape. “Cal’s got a gun!”

They stopped again. Cal moved the brown bag higher up under his arm. Two swallows came from nowhere and shot past them. Albie wouldn’t stop singing. Jeanette pulled the can of Coke out of her purse.

“It’s too early to drink it,” Holly said. She was in her first year of Girl Scouts and she had read the chapter about survival tactics in the handbook. “You have to make it last.”

Jeanette cracked the can open anyway. Watching her drink, they all decided they were thirsty. There would be more Cokes once they got to the lake.

“Cal’s got a gun,” Albie called, though with less interest.

Holly looked up at the sky. It was a complete blank. There wasn’t a single cloud to offer them protection. “I wish I had a Tic Tac,” she said.

Cal thought for a minute and then nodded his head. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic bag about the size of three postage stamps where he kept the Benadryl tablets his mother made him carry for his allergy. They all sat down, pushing back the grass, and Caroline opened up the brown bag. She was very formal about the way she picked up the gun and set it beside her, and then she handed out the Cokes. Cal came behind her and gave everyone two garish pink pills. “I shouldn’t give you any,” he said to Albie. “You’re annoying the hell out of me today.”

But Albie kept his palm up in silent demand until finally Cal sighed and gave him his two.

“This is what I needed,” Holly said, having brought the pills up to her mouth and then brought them down again, pressed beneath her thumb. She took the bottle of gin out of the bag and swigged it like Coke, but it surprised her. For a second she almost spit it out but she managed to keep her lips pressed together. She handed the bottle to her sister and then stretched out on her back. “Now I won’t mind walking to the lake,” Holly said.

Jeanette took a hit of the gin and coughed, then she leaned over and gave her pills to Albie. “You can have mine.”

He looked at the two extra pills in his palm. Now he had four. They were so pink in the bright light, in a background of so much colorless grass. “Why?” he said, maybe suspicious and maybe not.

Jeanette shrugged. “Tic Tacs give me a stomachache.” This was possible. Everything gave Jeanette a stomachache. That’s why she was so thin.

Franny watched Caroline, how she pushed the pills into her palm with her thumb and threw back her head as if to swallow them with a big slug of Coke. Caroline was always convincing. Franny could see she didn’t really drink the gin either. Her mouth wasn’t open when she tilted the bottle back. But when the bottle came to her, Franny decided she would compromise — swallow the gin and palm the pills. The gin could not have surprised her more. She followed the burning sensation as it went down her throat and through her chest and stomach. It was as hot and bright as the sun, settling between her legs — a beautiful sensation, as if the burning had brought about a sort of physical clarity. She took a second mouthful before handing the bottle to Albie. Albie drank the most of all.

The children didn’t mind waiting. Waiting was all part of it. It was hot outside and the Coke was still cold. It was nice just to lie there for a while and stare up into the emptiness of the sky, to not have to listen to Albie go on and on about nothing. When they finally got up Cal put his empty Coke can next to Albie’s leg.

“That’s littering,” Franny said.

“We’ll pick them up later,” he said. “We’ll have to come back for him.”

So they all left their cans beside Albie, who was sleeping the sleep of four Benadryls and a big slug of gin in the hot morning sun. Cal took back the other pills from Holly and his stepsisters and put them in the baggie and put the baggie back in his pocket. The candy bars were starting to melt and the gun was hot from being out in the sun and they put them all together back in the bag and headed for the lake.

When they got there, the five of them swam out farther than they would ever have been allowed to had the parents been with them. Franny and Jeanette went to look for caves and were taught to fish by two men they met standing off by themselves in a grove of trees on the shore. Cal stole a package of Ho-Ho’s from the bait shop and had no need to use the gun in the paper bag because no one saw him do it. Caroline and Holly climbed to the top of a high rock and leapt into the lake below again and again and again until they were too tired to climb anymore, too tired to swim. All of them were sunburned but they lay in the grass to dry because none of them had thought to bring a towel, but the drying-off bored them and so they decided to head back.

Their timing turned out to be perfect. Albie was awake but he was just sitting there in the field, quiet and confused amid the Coke cans, trying hard not to cry. He didn’t ask them where they had been or where he was, he just got up and followed in the line behind them as they passed. He was sunburned as well. It was just past two o’clock in the afternoon. The most amazing thing of all was that minutes after they came back to the Pinecone and stretched across the beds in the girls’ room in their damp swimsuits to watch television, the parents knocked on their door, bashful and apologetic. They couldn’t believe how long they’d slept. They had no idea how tired they must have been. They would take everyone to the movies and out for pizza in order to make it up to them. The parents seemed not to notice the swimsuits, the sunburns, the mosquito bites. The Cousins children and the Keating children smiled up with beatific forgiveness. They had done everything they had ever wanted to do, they had had the most wonderful day, and no one even knew they were gone.

It was like that for the rest of the summer. It was like that every summer the six of them were together. Not that the days were always fun, most of them weren’t, but they did things, real things, and they never got caught.