Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [45]
“You know he had Addisons? It only seems that no one in my family has an immune system; Benjie really didn’t. The scratches from the accident killed him. I moved back in; I had to, since Greta was hardly leaving the house after that. She’s seeing a shrink now, the guy I used to see. The boys are in therapy, too. I don’t know, I think it helps Danny, but he’s the strong one anyway. Marc is just …” Max turned away. “The world is a terrible place, sweetheart.”
She touched the edge of his jacket for comfort, fingering the little cracks in the old leather.
“I’m here. If you need me, I’m here.”
“No, you’re not. You’re at college, leading a college girl life, and I am here, leading my life. Enough.” He stood up. Elizabeth sat like a lump, arms around her legs. She shook her head, wanting to tell him it looked like she would actually graduate in June, that she’d passed all her courses and turned in all her papers, despite occasional, profound lapses in concentration, two weeklong bouts of self-prescribed bed rest, and several trials of psychotropic medications that left her dry-mouthed and dizzy, something pale green and sticky leaking from her right breast.
She had watched Rachel take college the way she’d taken the road cross-country, carefully aggressive, hardly checking the map, since all the signs seemed so clear to her and fairly helpful. Elizabeth’s college life had been like her driving, too: she did it because she believed she had to (only one application, scribbled in midwinter, while standing in the post office), she never once intuited the right direction, and she understood that her safe arrival, at the end of these four years, owed more to other people’s skill and sensible swerving than to her own efforts.
“I am here for you, just like you were for me. I can help,” Elizabeth said, and cried into the sleeve of her sweater, relieved that she did not, in fact, know what to do, that that had not changed between them.
“Don’t cry,” he said, as kindly as he could. He would have been dimly pleased to hear she was graduating, dimly concerned about the blackouts, but she was alive and Ben was not and her breasts were nothing to him now, unless they could be traded, every moment of them, for him. He hugged her to be rid of her, looking forward to walking back alone, to weeping inside for Ben, to preparing for another evening of emotional heavy lifting and grey, pointless goodness, for Danny’s driving lesson, for Marc’s marathon TV-watching, for the balanced meal he cooked (not that Greta ate), for creating a father for his remaining, less loved boys, now desperately seeking their own lives, if only he will let them go.
And Elizabeth pressed in close, smelling his cigarette smoke and his Scotch and his Barbasol shaving cream, smells so woven into her sense of life that the sight of those striped cans on a supermarket shelf will make her eyes swell with tears for years to come, even after she forgets this conversation.
“Anything you want, Max,” she said, to reach into him without his really hearing, so he’d let her in without knowing he’d done so.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Go home, milacku.”
Margaret laid out daughter-of-the-bride clothes, layering them from the peach silk skirt to the white lace blouse, an ivory nylon slip and pale peach pantyhose on top of the pile. Peach peau de soie shoes faced the bed. Idiot-proof dressing. Elizabeth drank champagne while she showered, drank stingers while she dried her hair, put on socially appropriate makeup, although not the peach-toned stuff her mother had piled suggestively in front of the bathroom