“Why do you say this?” Mom asked.
“The fairy tale. It was the only way you could tell us who you were.”
“Until the play,” Mom said. “I am sorry for that, Meredith.”
Meredith sat back in her seat. “I’ve waited for that apology all my life, and now that I have it, it doesn’t matter. I care about you, Mom. I just want us all to keep talking.”
“Why?” Mom said quietly. “How can you care? Either one of you?”
“We tried not to love you, too,” Nina said.
“I would say I made it easy,” Mom said.
“No,” Meredith said, “never easy.”
Mom reached out and poured three more vodkas. Lifting her glass, she looked at her daughters. “What shall we drink to?”
“How about family?” Stacey said, showing up just in time to pour a fourth shot. “To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost.” She clinked her glass against Mom’s.
“Is that an old Russian toast?” Nina asked after she’d downed her vodka.
“I’ve never heard it before,” Mom said.
“It’s what we say in my house,” Stacey said. “It’s good, don’t you think?”
“Da,” Mom said, actually smiling. “It is very good.”
On the walk back through town, Mom seemed to be standing taller. She was quick to smile or to point out a trinket in a store window.
Meredith couldn’t help staring. It was like seeing a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis. And somehow, seeing her new mother, or her mother in this new light, made Meredith feel differently about herself. Like her mom, she smiled easier, laughed more oft en. Not once had she worried about the office, or her girls, or missing the ship. She’d been happy just to be, to flow on this journey with her mom and sister. For once, they felt as intertwined as strands of a rope; where one went, the other belonged.
“Look,” Mom said as they came to the end of the street.
At first all Meredith saw were the quaint blue wooden shops and the distant snowy peak of Mount Edgecumbe. “What?”
“There.”
Meredith followed the invisible line from her mother’s pointing finger.
In a park across the street, standing beneath a streetlamp twined in bright pink flowers, there was a family, laughing together, posing for silly pictures. There was a woman with long brown hair, dressed in crisply pressed jeans and a turtleneck; a blond man whose handsome face seemed hardly able to contain the breadth of his smile; and two towheaded little girls, giggling as they pushed each other out of the picture.
“That is how you and Jeff used to be,” Mom said quietly.
Meredith felt a kind of sadness. It wasn’t what she’d felt before: not disappointment that her kids didn’t call, or fear that Jeff didn’t love her, or even worry that she had lost too much of herself. This new feeling was the realization that she wasn’t young anymore. The days of frolicking with her little girls were gone. Her children were on their own now, and Meredith needed to accept that. They would always be a family, but if she’d learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn’t a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn’t control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.
As she stood there, staring at strangers, she saw her marriage in moments. She and Jeff at the prom, dancing under a mirrored ball to “Stairway to Heaven” and French-kissing . . . her in labor, screaming at him to stay the f**k away from her with those ice chips . . . him handing her the first pages of his first novel and asking her opinion . . . and him standing beside her when Dad was dying, saying, Who takes care of you, Mere? and trying to hold her.
“I’ve been an idiot,” she said to no one except herself, forgetting for a moment that she was standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk, flanked by eavesdroppers.
“It’s about time,” Nina said, smiling. “I’m tired of being the only screw-up in this family.”
“I love Jeff,” Meredith said, feeling both miserable and elated.
“Of course you do,” Mom said.
Meredith turned to them. “What if it’s too late?”
Mom smiled, and Meredith was struck by both the beauty and the newness of the face she’d studied for decades. “I am eighty-one years old, telling my life story to my daughters. Every year, I thought it was too late to start, that I’d waited too long. But Nina here won’t take no for an answer.”
“Finally. Being a selfish bitch pays off.” Nina reached into her camera bag and pulled out a clunky cell phone, flipping it open. “Call him.”
“Oh. We’re having fun. It can wait.”
“No,” Mom said sharply. “Never wait.”
“What if—”
Mom laid a hand on her forearm. “Look at me, Meredith. I am what fear makes of a woman. Do you want to end up like me?”
Meredith slowly reached out and removed her mother’s sunglasses. Staring into the aqua-blue eyes that had always mesmerized her, Meredith smiled. “You know what, Mom? I’d be proud to have your strength. What you’ve been through—and we don’t know the worst of it, I think—it would have killed an ordinary woman. Only someone extraordinary could have survived. So, yeah, I do want to end up like you.”
Mom swallowed hard.
“But I don’t want to be afraid. You’re right about that. So give me that damn cell phone, Neener Beaner. I’ve got an overdue call to make.”
“We’ll meet you on the boat,” Nina said.
“Where?”
Mom actually laughed. “The bar, of course. The one with the view.”
Meredith watched her sister and mother walk down the sidewalk, away from her. Although the wind was blowing slightly, tapping a seashell chime in the eaves beside her, and somewhere a boat honked its horn, she couldn’t hear anything except the lingering echo of her mother’s laughter. It was a sound she’d keep forever, and pull out whenever she stopped believing in miracles.
She crossed the street, stopping traffic with a smile and an outheld palm. Passing the family still taking pictures of each other, she went to a small wooden bench that read: IN MEMORY OF MYRNA, WHO LOVED THIS VIEW.
She sat down on Myrna’s bench and stared out at the gaggle of fishing and pleasure boats in the marina below. Masts cocked and swayed with every invisible movement of the water. Seabirds cawed out to tourists and dove for golden fries.
She glanced at her watch, calculated Jeff’s schedule, and dialed his number.
It rang so many times she almost gave up.
Then, finally, he answered, sounding out of breath. “Hello?”
“Jeff?” she said, feeling tears rise up. It was all she could do to hold them back. “It’s me.”
“Meredith . . .”
She couldn’t quite pinpoint the emotion in his voice, and that bothered her. Once, she’d known every nuance. “I’m in Sitka,” she said, stalling.
“Is it as beautiful as they say?”
“No,” she decided. She wasn’t going to be afraid and she wasn’t going to waste time on the kind of facile conversations that had gotten her into this mess. “I mean yes, it is beautiful here, but I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about our daughters, either, or our jobs, or my mom. I want to say I’m sorry, Jeff. You asked me if I loved you, and I hit the brakes. I’m still not sure why. But I was wrong and stupid. I do love you. I love you and I miss you and I hope to hell I’m not too late because I want to grow old with the man I was young with. With you.” She drew in a sharp breath. It felt as if she’d been talking forever, spewing really, and now it was up to him. Had she hurt him too much? Waited too long? When the silence went on—she could hear a squeaky spring as he sat down on a bad sofa, and then his sigh—she said, “Say something.”
“December 1974.”
“What?”
“I was in line at the CUB. Karie Dovre elbowed me and when I looked over, I saw you standing by the tetherball. You’d been avoiding me, remember? After the Christmas play? You wouldn’t even look at me for two years. I tried lots of times to walk up to you, but I always lost my nerve at the last second. Until that day in December. It was snowing, and you were standing there, all by yourself, shivering. And before I could talk myself out of it, I walked over to you. Karie was yelling that I’d lose my place in the food line, but I didn’t care. When you looked up at me, I remember how hard it was to breathe. I thought you’d run away, but you didn’t, and I said, ‘Do you like banana splits?’ ” He laughed. “What an idiot. It was probably twenty-five degrees outside and I ask about ice cream. But you said yes.”
“I remember,” she said quietly.
“We have a thousand memories like that.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve tried to fall out of love with you, Mere. I couldn’t do it, but I thought sure as hell you had.”
“I didn’t fall out of love with you, either. I just . . . fell. Can we start over?”
“Hell, no. I don’t want to start over. I like the middle.”
Meredith laughed at that. She didn’t want to go back and be young again, either, not with all the uncertainties and angst. She just wanted to feel young again. And she wanted to change. “I’ll be nak*d more. I promise.”
“And I’ll make you laugh more. God, I’ve missed you, Mere. Can you come home right now? I’ll warm up the bed.”
“Almost.” She leaned back into the sun-baked wooden bench.
For the next half hour, they talked like they used to, about anything and everything. Jeff told her he’d almost finished his novel and Meredith told him part of her mother’s story. He listened in obvious awe, offering memories that suddenly made sense, times when Mom’s behavior had seemed inexplicable. All that food, he said, and the stuff she said . . .
They talked about the girls and how they were doing in school and what the summer would be like with the house full again.
“Have you figured out what you want?” Jeff finally said. “Besides me, that is?”
“I’m working on it. I think I want to expand the gift shop. Maybe let Daisy run Belye Nochi. Or even sell it.” She was surprised by her own words. She didn’t remember ever really thinking that before, but suddenly it made sense. “And I want to go to Russia. Leningrad.”
“You mean St. Petersburg, but—”
“It will always be Leningrad to me. I want to see the Summer Garden and the Neva River and the Fontanka Bridge. We never really went on a honeymoon. . . .”
He laughed. “Are you sure this is Meredith Cooper?”
“Meredith Ivanovna Cooper. That’s what my name would be in Russia. And yeah. It’s me. Can we go?”