Back on the train, Avery took a seat by the window and devoured the almond bar, licking melted chocolate off her fingertips. As they pulled out of the station, she tried to think of what she was going to say to her mother, but her mind kept pulling her back home, back to London and to Chiti. In that week of silence between them before she came to New York, she had phoned Charlie and told him she couldn’t see him again, news he took with game equanimity. That was one benefit of having slept with a young, newly sober poet on the brink of literary acclaim, she thought. He was, rightfully so, too involved with his own burgeoning life to give much thought to Avery’s predictably middle-aged and middle-class crises. She had tried at first to apologize again to Chiti, but her fumbling attempts at contrition were instantly rebuffed. She’d bought bunches of snapdragons, Chiti’s favorite flowers, and arranged them in sprays of sunset hues—fuchsia, yellow, and peach—all over the house. She’d written notes and left them in her shoes. Please forgive me in her right heel. I’m a fucking idiot in her left. She’d attempted to cook one of Chiti’s favorite dishes, coq “no” vin (coq au vin, without the wine) for dinner, but Chiti had walked in on her before she could finish.
Please get out of my kitchen, Chiti said, raising a hand as if to protect herself. Her expression was anguished. No more apologies. No more notes. It’s not helping, Avery.
After that, Avery had stayed away from the house as much as possible, pouring herself into the endless pit of her work. When she was home, she skulked like a shadow, trying not to upset Chiti with her presence. On the seventh night of this purgatory, Chiti had knocked on their bedroom door while Avery lay sleepless in bed, watching the shadows move slow as time across the ceiling.
You don’t have to knock. Avery sat up as Chiti opened the door. This is your room. I keep saying I should be the one in the guest bedroom.
Chiti didn’t venture farther into the room.
I think you should go to New York, she said from the doorway. Go be with your sisters.
But I want to stay with you, pleaded Avery. We have…stuff to deal with.
Chiti shook her head.
I don’t need you here like a dog that’s crapped on the rug and is trying to get back into its owner’s good graces.
Avery winced, since this was exactly how she felt.
But I want to make things better, she said.
Chiti shook her head.
You don’t know what you want, she said.
Before Avery could answer, Chiti had retreated into the hallway, the door clicking softly behind her.
So, Avery had left, determined to at least help her sisters tackle the grief pit that was Nicky’s belongings and keep the apartment safe from a sale, though it turned out she’d messed that up too. For the first time in a long time, no one needed her. She should feel free, but she only felt lost.
Bonnie was right that it had been hard to be back in the New York apartment after so long, a place so small and yet so full. The first thing Avery did when they’d bought their house in London was check if there were locks on the bedroom doors. Even after all these years. When Chiti asked her what her favorite part of the house was after they put in the offer, she had said, without thinking, that she liked that in addition to the front door, it had a back door that led through to the garden. As always, Chiti had understood the heart of the matter immediately. Your father doesn’t live here, she’d reassured her gently. You won’t need to escape. But Avery’s father lived inside of Avery, the one home she could never leave. She had once heard a man in an AA meeting talk about how his father used to grab his neck from behind when drunk; even as an adult, he couldn’t sit in the middle of the dining room in restaurants without jumping every time a server moved behind him. The only thing that had ever quelled that edginess was to have a drink himself. In the back of the meeting, unnoticed by anyone, Avery had surprised herself by bursting into tears; she hadn’t known, until she listened to him, why she always sat with her back to the wall.
Avery closed her eyes. She didn’t want to remember, but the memories came, steady and relentless as the river outside. Bang. Her father slamming the front door. Bang. A kitchen cupboard. Bang. The wedding china. There was the Christmas that the oven broke yet again. Her father yanked down the tree in the living room in a rage. Pine needles everywhere; they would still find them in the carpet long into the spring. Her parents were screaming at each other in the kitchen; they heard the thud of someone pushing the other against the sink. Her mother had run to the bedroom where Avery and her sisters were huddled and pushed her slender wallet into Avery’s hands. Take them and go, she’d mouthed. Avery had dutifully hurried them all out of the building, leading them single file like ducklings down Columbus Avenue, the wind sinking its teeth through their woolen coats. Her sisters did not know that Avery had no idea where she was taking them. They trusted her to have a plan. They walked for blocks past shuttered storefronts and empty restaurants; it seemed the entire Upper West Side was inside celebrating with their families. Eventually, they found a dim sum restaurant and feasted on round after round of dumplings, making a game of playing with the spinning top in the center of the table. When they returned home, the oven was back on, and the tree was upright. Their mother had roasted a chicken and potatoes and that evening they all sat down without mentioning what had happened. Even though they were full, Avery and her sisters ate everything their mother cooked.
She had done what she needed to do, Avery reminded herself now. She had stayed until her last sister moved out, a deadline made easier by Lucky’s modeling career taking off so young. She left that apartment, and did not come back, not that year or for many years after. Only now did she realize how rarely she thought of her father, of her whole childhood. She had built another life, far away and untouched on its own island, one that, until recently, she had done anything to protect. She could not have known that she would one day build the dream she longed for, a home where she never used the locks on the doors. She could not have expected that freedom would look like that, a forgetting that was so close to, but not, forgiveness.
—
Since her mother hadn’t offered to pick her up, Avery took a taxi from the station. Their parents had moved upstate half a decade earlier, citing their father’s health as the reason. Avery had visited over the years, not as much as Nicky but far more than Bonnie or Lucky had ever bothered to, but the place wasn’t home, and she had no particular connection to it. The taxi pulled up to a small wooden cabin with a wraparound porch. The house was in a worse state than she remembered. Clusters of shingles had fallen off the roof like bald patches on a head and one side of the wooden banisters lining the porch steps had rotted away. An assortment of rusty wind chimes offered their conflicting cacophony of notes, one as large as a grandfather clock, another no longer than a watch strap. Avery watched a handful of golden chickens peck warily at the ground around the porch. Then the door flung open, and her mother appeared.
Avery was taken aback. None of them had seen their mother since the funeral, but she looked markedly changed. Had she always looked like this? So witchy? Her hair, thick and kinked as a metal scrubbing brush, was piled on top of her head. She wore layers of black diaphanous fabric, a poncho-style top that could either have been an extortionately priced item from Eileen Fisher or an old rag with a hole cut in the top; Avery couldn’t tell. Her lined face was bare and she wore no jewelry except a large silver men’s watch. The overall effect was severe and, in the city, could have been quite stylish but, in this context, lent her mother a hermitlike quality. When Avery got closer, she saw there was noticeable black dirt around and under her fingernails.
“I always wanted chickens!” her mother declared in lieu of a greeting. “And now I have them.”
Avery had practiced the line she’d planned to open with on the train: What the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking cunt? But now she was standing in front of her, the words felt ridiculous. What had she expected coming up here? That she would confront their mother…and what? She’d hop on a train back to the city with her, broker peace between the sisters, shower them in the maternal love they’d been deprived of for the past thirty years and everything would magically be okay? They all had their roles, and they weren’t going to change them now. Their mother wasn’t really a mother, and Avery covered for her; their father wasn’t really a father, and their mother covered for him. Trying to change them now would be needlessly painful for everyone.
Avery looked toward the patch of dirt her mother was pointing at, where a cluster of birds were clucking around a chipped xylophone. She recognized it as one of their old toys, its painted rainbow hues since faded by time and rain. There was something unbearably sad about seeing it there, but she tried to nod enthusiastically.
“They lay eggs and everything?” she asked.
Her mother guffawed.
“What a question! No, they shit chocolate. Yes, they lay eggs! Why else do you think I got them?”
“I was kidding, Mom. They’re cool.”
Only her mother could make her feel so stupid, so adolescent. For Avery, a person whose intelligence was the hook upon which she hung her entire identity, the feeling was catastrophic. Her mother wiped her hands on the front of her dress-sack-thing and blew hair out of her face.
“I’ve been busy with what is euphemistically called ‘putting the garden to bed,’ which is like saying Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents was childcare.” She barked a laugh. “The compost bins are heaving with all the cuttings, and I spend my days slashing everything back with great enthusiasm. As you can see, the abundance of summer will not be tamed.”
Avery had no idea what to say to this. The garden was indeed wild looking. Beyond the house, waist-length grass dotted with pink clouds of milkweed and other wildflowers Avery couldn’t name stretched forth in a ramshackle profusion. Her mother looked at her expectantly, hoping, perhaps, for some shared sense of admiration, then gave up. Avery remained looking around in silence.
“Well,” said her mother, with a hint of disappointment.
“Why do the chickens have a xylophone?” attempted Avery, but her mother had moved on.
“How was the ride up?” she asked briskly. “Did you sit on the left side so you could see the river?”
Avery had, in fact, and enjoyed the sight of the fat, dark ribbon of water rushing past, but she hated being told what to do by anyone, especially her mother.
“I was working,” she said. “I worked the whole ride.”
“You’re too busy working to look at a river?”
“I’m in the middle of a case.”
Avery, who had been falling behind at work the past week, had done nothing of the sort, but the urge to make it clear to her mother that she was busy and important was immediate.
“Well, you’ll see it on the way back if it’s not too dark. You should have come earlier.”
