“It’s my first dinner party,” says Caitlin, watching Maya’s eyes scan the room and settle on the table, set for five: wine glasses and simple white flatware, a sweating-in-the-warm-air water pitcher, filled with a bottom layer of mint and fruit.
“I had to improvise,” Caitlin says, motioning toward the table. She has a wooden spoon in her left hand and is sautéing kale with onions and garlic. A pile of steaks, left to rest and slathered in what looks like some kind of cilantro pesto, sits on the last bit of counter space.
Maya hands her the bottle of Sangiovese she’s brought. Caitlin holds it a minute, then grabs a wine key and passes the bottle back to Maya. “Perfect,” she says. “You want a glass?”
Maya tears the foil slowly. She turns the screw into the cork and pops it out. Caitlin passes her a glass and Maya’s careful with her wrist, twirling the bottle up in order that no drops fall.
“Thanks,” says Caitlin. She looks expectant, her eyes staying on Maya as she sips her first glass.
“How are you?” Maya asks.
Caitlin shrugs. “Okay,” she says. She stops, as if the room, or something just outside the window, will tell her how she really is. “Good, I think,” she says.
Maya smiles at her, watching her hands deftly work the spoon, then cover the steaks with a white dish towel while they rest. “How’s the writing?” Maya asks.
Caitlin shakes her head, but there’s a smile forming on her lips. “Okay,” she says. “You know.”
“I don’t,” says Maya. She can’t imagine the courage it must take, stories all her own. “Tell me.”
“Well, there’ve been some big life things happening,” says Caitlin. Her palm rests on her stomach briefly as she says this. Maya wonders. There’s no sign of a partner in the apartment. She’s noticed that Caitlin has so far left her wine untouched.
“Of course,” Maya says, excited suddenly. She lets herself imagine it a moment, a child forming inside Caitlin. A whole new life from scratch.
“I started tutoring a few months ago.” She moves back and forth between the pans with her wooden spoon and stirs and flips. She turns back to Maya. “It’s better, you know? I’m so happy to be teaching again.”
Maya nods. “Of course.” She sips her wine again and tries to make out Caitlin’s shape beneath her dress.
“Even if it’s mostly standardized tests.”
“Can I do something?” Maya asks as Caitlin pours herself a glass of water. It would be too forward to tell her to sit down.
“No. No, tell me about you. How’s school? How’re Ben and Ellie?” Maya stops breathing a minute. She watches Caitlin’s face to see if she knows.
“Well,” she says, “Ben’s in his second year, but he might. .” She wonders where the rest of the guests are. If maybe it could just be the two of them. Maybe she could just sit here quietly and Caitlin could help her to make sense of everything. “He might take a semester to figure some things out.”
Caitlin nods. “I wish I’d been smart enough to do that at that age.”
Maya smiles. She’s so glad to be with Caitlin now.
“And Ellie?” Maya’s been quiet too long, she realizes. She looks out at the pool across the street, wants to ask Caitlin to promise to have her over to go swimming in the spring.
Another time: Caitlin had come crying to Maya’s office after class, distraught. It was her second year. Maya thought school, at first, that she was overwhelmed suddenly by too much coursework. It was what she was meant to advise students on, but then they ended up dissolving over so much worse once she had them all alone. It turned out, with Caitlin, to be much messier than her middle-ages obligations. There was a boy, apparently, a man, as Caitlin said, but when Maya looked at any of them, mostly all she saw were boys. Caitlin said he was a friend in the department. She’d made advances. He’d snubbed her. “Never in my life,” she said, “have I actually tried to act on something like this.” She was twenty-four then, Maya knew. The idea that she’d never pursued a boy until then, it both shocked Maya and made perfect sense. And now this.
“He’s my only friend here,” Caitlin said. “He’s allowing me to blame the alcohol, though I’d hardly had a beer. He’s trying very hard to act as if we’re all just fine being friends.” She gave no names. There was another girl involved, a friend of Caitlin’s, with whom she thought the boy might be in love. “Of course, she has no use for him,” said Caitlin. “She has no idea.”
She was one of the strongest students Maya had ever taught, the brightest. Maya wanted so much to scrape all of the hurt out of her life and tell her just to focus, to show her somehow that the only certain satisfaction would come from her own mind. She wanted her not to be felled by so predictable a situation, to be a little less just like every other girl. “I don’t have anyone but the two of them,” said Caitlin. You have me, thought Maya, but that was different. She was too far away, too old. She reached across her desk to grab hold of Caitlin’s hand. “Honey,” she said.
Maya could not remember now how she’d gotten to talking that day about Ellie, the drugs, the boys, the Trouble. It had felt like all that she could offer. She’d meant to make herself vulnerable somehow and maybe more available for Caitlin. She wanted Caitlin to see how lucky she was to know so clearly who she was. She hadn’t meant for it to all feel so exploitative. This was her daughter, after all. But nothing that she seemed capable of giving Ellie then was helping; she thought at least she could help Caitlin. She’d gone into greater depth than she ever had about her daughter to anyone. She knew Caitlin would listen. She told herself she was showing Caitlin what a gift it was to be herself and know so much.
When she was done, though, she was no longer able to look directly at the girl in front of her. When she got home she didn’t look Ellie in the face either. She’d used one to help the other. She was pretty sure that neither would turn out better as a result.
“She’s. .” Maya says to Caitlin, not sure, still, how to say what Ellie is. She can lie or she can tell her everything. She wonders how Caitlin will react, if she won’t be surprised. She watches her, cooking, maybe starting to fill up with a child of her own, asking earnestly about this girl who was so rude to her. Maya takes the last sip of her wine and tells Caitlin everything.
Summer 2011
“The atmospheric conditions have to be conducive to formation, in this case, summer and warm water.” This is not how five-year-olds should talk, but Jack’s reading from Weather.com as rain comes down in torrents and bangs loudly on the tin roof of the house. He has his laptop on his lap and refuses to look up at her. “Instead of the visible compactness of the hurricane, the satellite view of the tropical depression can often just resemble a large group of thunderstorms. But rotation can usually be perceived when looking at a group of pictures from satellites.” He has unlimited access to the Internet, and this is what he spends his time on. It’s been raining the past three days, since two days after Ellie’s arrival. It’s a tropical depression. Annie has promised the end is close. “Wind speed up to thirty-nine miles an hour.” She’s also explained this is one of Jack’s “things.” He looks everything up and recites the facts he finds. It is, Annie says, “his way of trying to feel more in control of life.”