“If that’s what you want, buttercup, just tell Martin.”
Ida started to roll her eyes but stopped midway. What was the point? She was so accustomed to being palmed off, it was hard to muster the pique. “Can’t you call me Ida?” she said. “Even Ma and Pop call me Ida.”
Esme winced. These were not words she wanted to hear. Ma and Pop. Especially in the present tense.
“Okay, honey bun. Ida.”
“So when are we going?” Ida said, though she was not saying so much as whining. It was hard to know when the whine got telling of a developmental problem, but Esme was still pretty sure the distended vocals that sang her child’s needs were age appropriate. “There’ll be too many people if you take forever. Get dressed, Mom. Hurry up.”
Esme said, “Okay, okay. Should I wear a skort, too?”
“Don’t try to be cute. Just get dressed.”
And like that, and because her extracurriculars were no joke, Ida pivoted on the ball of her foot — she was all grace — and danced down the aisle. At the door, she said, “Can we call Ma and Pop after?”
And Esme, who had gotten no better at lying to her daughter in the three weeks since her parents had died, pretended not to have heard. For all Ida knew, they were still alive and missing her every day.
Esme shook her head. Tried not to see the big picture, though this was like squinting at the drive-in.
Olgo’s phone. Ned’s phone. Bruce’s and Anne-Janet’s. No one was answering, and still no update. From the wings of this mission, a creep of remorse. Surely they would resurface soon, report, and resume their lives at home. And for her trouble, Esme would have delivered a new day in a sequence that seemed to stretch without end back to that first day without her husband. She did not dwell on the years intervening. Or perhaps she just had the worst memory of anyone she knew. Episodes stood out, but mostly she moved forward as the great slab doors shut behind her. And maybe this was for the best. When people got married and trailed behind their car a mobile of cans whose clamor would follow them into their new life — what sort of metaphor was that? Sever the ties. Move on. Forget everything that had ever happened to you the second it was over.
She could not possibly go ice-skating with her daughter today. Too much work, other priorities. Crystal was the answer. Esme buzzed the garage attendant and told him to reroute her to the greenhouse. Poor Crystal. She was Helix, but on the fringe. Her and her thousand-plus friends. What absurdity that a movement for unity had a secessionist fringe. It was true the Helix had started well before the purloined election of 2000, but if ever people were going to feel disenfranchised and furious and wanting to sever from the body that had hitherto united them, it had been in this aftermath and dawn of a new century. And there he’d been, Thurlow Dan, plugging away. Why else would the North Koreans have taken an interest unless on the bent knee of the Helix demographic was a rocket of dissent? Only a man like Thurlow would see in their overture something peaceable and grand. She smiled with the thought, then moved on.
Esme had plucked Crystal out of foster care four years ago. Her thinking then: I am lonely without my own daughter but won’t have to mind a teenager half as much. But then Esme ended up barely minding Crystal at all. And so, for having lived in the mansion and seen so little of Esme, Crystal must have realized that her foster mom — whom she called Godmom because it sounded less tragic — was less keen on her than on having acquired her.
In their time together, Esme had only twice seen Crystal pursue a goal with vigor, the first being multiple attempts to escape this house after she got here, and the other, seditious unrest. Now that she was eighteen, she also went to work. She worked for Bruce’s wife, Rita — no coincidence there.
The attendant said Crystal wanted her car keys. That she would not come to the greenhouse; she was late already. Esme said, “Use the brain God gave you. Withhold the keys!” Crystal got on the intercom. She said, “Esme, I have to go. Some of us actually work for a living.”
They sparred, Esme won, Crystal showed up in sweatpants and shirt. Sympathy clothes for Rita. She was chewing a straw; no drink.
“Your kid’s pissed off,” Crystal said. “I just saw her rip her skirt to shit.”
“Skort.”
“So you want to talk to her or something?”
“Actually, that’s why I called you in here. And she has a name by the way. It’s Ida.”
“Oh boy,” Crystal said, the straw flying into the larkspur and she settling into a chair. “Let me guess.”
“Please,” Esme said. “Something urgent has come up. It’ll just be a couple hours at the rink.”
“Have I mentioned she shredded her clothes?”
“How about I pay you?”
“Urgent like your nail broke, or like your colorist had to reschedule? Ugh, fine. For three hundred dollars, I will skate to Tibet and back.”
“Sold. But try to be nice. You’re her sister, you know.”
“Oh, please. That didn’t even work when I was fourteen.”
“Just be nice, okay?”
“Whatever”—and she extended her palm, knowing Esme had a roll of cash in her bathrobe pocket. Esme was, to her, a woman of leisure whose conduct sustained a notion that rich women were weird, rich women had money on them, rich women spent their days in such boredom, no one thought to ask and so no one ever knew.
Laptop open. So many windows, so many views, but Esme knew where the action was at. Ida, in her bathroom, spread-legged, with the contents of her Spa Science kit arrayed on the tile. Scented oils, a couple of pipettes, sea salt, test tubes, glycerin bar. The walls were tickered with strips of fabric that had been the skorts. Just now, she had oats in the coffee grinder and a yogurt-honey blend she’d mix and apply to her face with a tongue depressor. Esme liked that she was interested in science, or girl stuff that masqueraded as science, because it meant something of Esme’s father was alive in her, not to mention something of Esme, though she tried not to think about that part.
Crystal’s head popped into the bathroom, and when it seemed she was not getting thrown out, she made for the lip of the tub, which was more sill than lip, and more seat than sill, this being a water closet of excess, 15×20×10, if ceiling height mattered, which it did, come time to feel yourself dwarfed by the expression of money your parents had lavished on you.
Esme muted the volume on her computer because what she imagined they were saying was probably worse than how it went, and this was the punishment she deserved. Funny Bruce had mentioned Sunset Boulevard; it’s what came to mind now, Norma Desmond saying, “We didn’t need dialogue; we had faces.” It’s what Thurlow used to say on days they spent staring at their newborn. Ida on that play mat with the arches overhead, groping for toys, gumming the fur, and them on either side, on their stomachs, watching the world dilate in her eyes. Esme did not get to see this reaction much anymore, though she couldn’t know if it was because novelty no longer solicited at her child’s door or because, when it did, she just wasn’t there.
Ida retrieved rose petals from a dish of oil, and the only way Esme knew Crystal had broken the news Mom wasn’t skating was from a pause in Ida’s chemistry, just time enough for the love in her heart to freeze over.
Crystal appeared to laugh, and because this was not in the script, Esme upped the volume and heard her say, “I know, totally, and in those gross slippers, too. Just be glad you get to go with me instead,” and Ida saying, “I dunno, I kinda like those slippers,” so that Esme closed her computer, brought a hand across her mouth, and tasted the bile that had come up her throat because, despite all, her child continued to reenlist in the collapse of her hopes. Her child still loved, still loved her mom. And this, it turned out, was worse than being unloved, because with love comes expectation.