5
AT THE SOUND OF Perri’s Lexus grinding up the gravel in the driveway, Olympia went outside to help escort their father from the car. Emerging from the backseat, Bob seemed as wobbly as a three-legged chair. But Perri reported that the surgery had gone well. He was also cogent enough to be mumbling, “The pleasures of oxycodone—not to be discounted!” Even so, Olympia found it jarring to see her dad looking so helpless and frail. The two of them rarely exchanged more than two sentences in a row. Moreover, in the twenty years since she’d left home, Olympia had no memory of Bob ever calling her. (Though on occasion he’d answer the phone when she called Hastings, and say, “Hello, sweetheart. I’ll pass the phone to Mom.”) And yet, she somehow loved him more than she’d ever loved another man. These were her thoughts as she helped transport him into the house, then up the stairs, where he collapsed onto his bed and dozed off with a light snore.
The four Hellinger women gathered in the kitchen, where Carol shook her head and declared, “A genius the man may be. But he’s a terrible patient! All he did was complain. You’d think it was something actually serious.”
“I didn’t hear him complain once,” said Perri.
“He did have to get surgery,” said Olympia.
“Fine. Gang up on me, all of you,” snapped Carol, her lower lip suddenly quivery.
“No one’s ganging up on you, Mom,” said Olympia, sighing. On top of being sharp-tongued, her mother was incredibly sensitive.
“Whatever you say,” said Carol. Lips now puckered, she hooked her “pocketbook” over her shoulder. “Now if you all will excuse me, I’m going out for some fresh air. I’ve been cooped up in that awful hospital all day.”
“You’re going out for a walk now?” asked Olympia. “It’s already getting dark.”
“I’m not going to turn into a vampire!” She harrumphed. “This is a new one—having to get permission from my daughters to take a walk.”
Olympia rolled her eyes but said nothing more. Had her mother been this petulant while they were growing up? It was hard to remember.
“If you’re going out anyway, maybe you can save me a trip and drop Dad’s prescription off at the pharmacy,” said Perri.
“If I still have it, I’ll be happy to drop it off.” Carol dug her hand into her bag and pulled out her reading glasses, followed by a crumpled slip of paper, which she proceeded to uncrumple, then squint at, before announcing, “No doubt for some kind of sugar pills. But as you wish.” She deposited the slip back into her bag. Then she turned to her eldest daughter, and said, “Why don’t you go home, Perri. You’ve done enough already.”
“It’s fine. I’ll wait with Dad until you come back,” she said.
“Gus and I can handle it,” said Olympia.
“It’s fine!” Perri declared a little more aggressively this time. Apparently, the Queen of all Dutiful Daughters wasn’t ready to abdicate her title just yet, Olympia thought. Perri glanced at her watch. “I’m going to miss Parent-Teacher Conference Night, anyway. Mike will have to report back.”
“I didn’t know he got home that early from work,” said Olympia.
“He was laid off a few weeks ago,” Perri replied matter-of-factly.
“What?!” said Olympia, shocked and also a little bit hurt. She may have hated sharing facts about her own life—having them shared, too—but she still expected to be first in the loop when it came to major events in the lives of her sisters. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” she asked.
“I guess I forgot,” said Perri, shrugging.
“So I’m the last person to know?” Olympia turned from Gus to Carol, neither of whom reacted, suggesting to Olympia that the answer was “yes.”
“Well, I’m really sorry for Mike—and for you, too,” said Olympia, wondering if oversight was to blame. Or was it possible that Perri was somehow embarrassed to tell Olympia? And, if so, why? It wasn’t as if Olympia had never been fired from a job—far from it. Or maybe that was the point: Perri didn’t want Olympia to think that she and Mike had anything even remotely in common.
“He was looking to change jobs, anyway,” Perri said quickly. “And he got seven months of severance. Anyway!” She turned her back, apparently done with the topic. “I’m going to check on Dad.”
“And I’m going to check that the sky still exists,” said Carol, lowering her beret over her ears.
“See you soon,” said Olympia.
The back door went thwwack as Carol closed it behind her.
Olympia and her sisters sat at the kitchen table, snacking on stale Ritz crackers they’d found in the cupboard and talking about health-care reform (Perri had mixed feelings about the “public option”); whether Lady Gaga was derivative of Madonna (Olympia thought yes; Gus thought they were both “plastic poseurs,” although she appreciated Gaga’s gay-friendly message; Perri wasn’t entirely sure who Lady Gaga was); and old classmates whose lives had taken tragic turns. “Remember that kid, Jimmy Trevor?” said Gus, reaching for the nut cracker. She splintered a walnut. Carol still bought them with the shell on. Pieces flew by Perri’s face and into the sink.
“Jesus! Watch it!” said Perri, palm raised in self-protection. “That almost hit me in the eye!”
“Oh, sorry,” said Gus.
“Who’s Jimmy Trevor?” asked Olympia, even though she sort of knew.
“Oh, come on!” cried Gus. “You went to junior prom with his brother, David. Jimmy was two years behind him. Hello?”
“Maybe I remember him.”
“Why do you always pretend not to know people from your past?”
Olympia wasn’t sure herself. “I don’t,” she said, attempting to match Perri’s superior tone with a disaffected one of her own. “It’s just—do we always have to talk about high school?”
“No, we don’t always have to talk about high school,” said Gus, clearly miffed. “I just thought you’d want to know that Jimmy Trevor enlisted in the f*cking Marine Corps a few years ago and got sent to Iraq, where he recently lost both of his legs!”
“Ohmygod, that’s horrible,” said Olympia, feeling guilty. “Poor guy.”
Twenty minutes went by. Then a half hour. Then an hour. Then an hour and twenty minutes. They’d covered nearly everyone in their high school and extended family, along with all the major stories in the current news cycle. Still, there was no sign of Carol. Miss Clavel turned on the light and said, “Something is not right!”… Miss Clavel ran fast and faster. The words from Lola’s favorite picture book flitted through Olympia’s head. “What the heck happened to Mom?” she said.
“I’m sure she’ll be back in a few minutes,” said Gus.
“I’m going out to look for her,” said Perri, rising from her chair.
“I’m coming with you,” said Olympia, standing too.
“You guys need to chill out,” said Gus. “She’s probably looking at the sunset or something.”
“The sun went in more than an hour ago,” snapped Perri, grabbing her keys off the countertop.
“Then there’s a long line at the pharmacy, or something. Friday-night Xanax prescription refills. Everyone’s stocking up for the weekend.”
“You really think Mom would spend an hour waiting in line at the pharmacy?” said Olympia, chin lowered and one eyebrow raised as she fitted her arms through the sleeves of her coat. “She already told us she thought the prescription was for sugar pills.”
“Well, I think you guys are making too big a deal out of it,” Gus called after them.
By then, Olympia and Perri were already out the door, Olympia without her coat.
As Olympia waited for Perri to unlock the doors to the Lexus, her shoulders shimmied involuntarily in the cold. It had been awhile since she and Perri had gone anywhere together. The SUV was enormous. Sitting up high in the passenger seat next to her big sister, Olympia recalled distant memories of cruising through the neighborhood with Perri in Carol’s then ten-year-old Toyota Corolla, hoping to catch sight of someone’s crush playing basketball in his driveway. Even when the crush had been Perri’s—which is to say, even when Perri and her on-again, off-again boyfriend-for-all-four-years-of-high-school, Andy Lyons, were off again—her sister had acted as if she were doing Olympia a favor, chauffeuring her around town. (Nineteen months older than Olympia, Perri had gotten her driver’s license first.)
Yet Olympia had always suspected that her yearbook-editing, flute-playing, field hockey stick–wielding, student-government president sister had enjoyed their pointless, directionless, résumé-building-less jaunts more than she’d let on—jaunts that frequently concluded with Diet Coke and large fries orders at the McDonald’s take-out window on Central Ave. and Perri’s beloved George Michael on the tape deck, singing, You gotta have faith, faith, faith. Olympia had enjoyed their outings, too. In her official version of her childhood, her older sister had been bossy, patronizing, and hopelessly uncool. In the possibly realer version, Olympia had missed Perri more than she’d ever thought she would after Perri left for Penn. She could still picture her in her “first day of college” outfit—pressed Levi’s with carefully torn knees, a white polo shirt with the collar up, and a navy blue blazer with gold nautical buttons draped over one arm. Olympia never understood how her sister kept her rope bracelet so clean.
It had also been Perri who had comforted Olympia after the whole Mr. Grunholz mess, albeit in Perri’s characteristically abrasive and peremptory way. “I’m sorry,” she’d told Olympia. “But the man smells like liverwurst. Also, he has a weird-shaped head. I don’t know how you could have gotten naked with him. Anyway, if I were you, I’d take a long shower and pretend it never happened.” To Perri’s credit, however, that was also the last time she ever mentioned the man, or the incident. Even Mr. Grunholz’s eventual firing went uncommented upon by her older sister.
Meanwhile, Olympia had felt guilty and ashamed. Statutory rape laws aside, the blow job she’d given her thirty-eight-year-old English teacher at the age of seventeen in the back of his Pontiac Sunbird in the parking lot behind Temple Beth Shalom had been strictly voluntary. What’s more, she’d enjoyed it—if not the actual deed, then the sensation of limitless power it conferred. She’d also enjoyed the sound of Mr. Grunholz’s low groans and the sight of his eyeballs rolling back in his head—until she’d made the mistake of telling a friend, who’d told another friend. Eventually, the story had gotten back to her mother, who’d chosen to interpret the situation as one in which a predator had preyed on her beautiful, unsuspecting young daughter. Olympia had done nothing to dispel the notion. Little wonder that Mr. Grunholz had been so furious at her. She still remembered passing him in the hall while the case had been pending before the school board. He’d said nothing, but the look on his face had been of someone who’d been betrayed. Even two decades later, the thought of that unforgiving face still made Olympia shudder.
Gus’s casual invocation of the man’s name had been cruel and uncalled for, Olympia thought as Perri pulled out of the driveway. Wasn’t there a tacit agreement between sisters that certain traumatic events of the past were never to be alluded to again? Olympia had never dared mention Perri’s outpatient treatment for OCD and bulimia while she was in college—or Gus’s dalliance with self-cutting and speed during late high school.
Perri turned onto Maple Avenue. As she did so, Olympia stole a glance at her older sister’s face, at her clenched yet ever so slightly loosening jaw, a double chin that hadn’t quite arrived. The sight both fascinated and frightened her. Middle age was sneaking up on them unawares, it seemed. Olympia recalled a black-and-white photograph from the 1940s of her grandmother and great-aunt, both of them with dark painted lips and short stiff hair peeking out of bizarre hats that resembled airplane neck rests. Not too many years from now, Olympia thought, she and Perri would likely become those unstylish, pity-inducing “ancestors” in the eyes of their own children, and then grandchildren. Maybe they already were? “Where should we go first?” asked Olympia.
“To the pharmacy, obviously,” said Perri.
Olympia didn’t answer. Obviously nothing, she thought irritably. Perri was structurally incapable of conceding that she was as clueless as the rest of them about what they were all doing here on earth. And at the same time, it came as a relief just then to be with someone who was willing to keep up the fiction of certainty. “Sounds like a plan,” Olympia murmured impassively.
Perri made a left onto Spring Street, then a right onto Warburton. She got only so far. There was a police car parked diagonally in front of Hastings Prime Meats, its flashers on. The pharmacy was directly across the street. One cop stood to the left of the car directing southbound traffic around the north side of the street. Another stood near a flashlight beam, writing in a notebook, his stance wide. Yellow tape encircled a wide swath of the adjacent sidewalk. “What the hell is this?” said Olympia.
Without answering, Perri jerked the car over into an empty space in front of a hydrant and got out. Olympia followed, her cheeks lowered against the wind.
Upon closer inspection, there were jagged white objects scattered across the sidewalk behind the tape.
Perri approached the scribbling cop. “Excuse me, Officer,” she said. “May I ask what happened here?”
The man took his time looking up from his notepad. Finally, he answered, “A streetlamp bulb struck a pedestrian.”
Olympia looked up. Sure enough, one of the old-fashioned wrought-iron streetlamps that lined Warburton was missing its opaque white orb. The lamp itself was also leaning at a precarious angle over the sidewalk. “Well, we’re looking for our mother, Carol Hellinger,” Perri went on. “She was on her way to the pharmacy about an hour and a half ago on foot. She’s five foot one with medium-length silver hair. And she was wearing a bright purple winter coat and matching purple beanie—”
“It’s more like a beret,” interjected Olympia.
“Beret-beanie-whatever,” barked Perri, clearly irritated at having been corrected.
The police officer seemed reluctant to divulge any more information. He scribbled some more in his notebook. Then he said, “The victim hasn’t been identified yet. She was taken to the ER at St. John’s Riverside, fifteen minutes ago. If your mother is missing, I suggest you go to the station and file a missing persons report.”
So it was a she, Olympia thought, her stomach tightening around her belt.
“Thank you for the advice,” snapped Perri.
“You can’t park there,” said the policeman, motioning at Perri’s car with his lantern jaw.
“We’ll be leaving in five minutes after we search the pharmacy for our missing elderly mother!” declared Perri, officious even in a crisis.
Olympia found the description unfair: Carol was only sixty-five. But this time, she didn’t dare object.
It seemed that Olympia wasn’t the only one feeling cowed by Perri. “You need to move the car in five minutes,” the cop mumbled back at her.
“Of course,” said Perri, starting across the street.
Again, Olympia followed. The creeping headlights made her feel blind.
The local pharmacy was another of Hastings’s f-you’s to chain stores, none of which were allowed in the downtown. The first thing you saw when you walked in was an old-fashioned soda fountain complete with chrome stools with vinyl seats. Behind the fountain were the actual health and beauty products, all of them laid out on wooden shelves so pleasing to the eye that even the maxi-pads looked quaint. At the back of the store, next to the drop-off window, was a fish tank featuring Frisbee-sized anemones that, depending on your perspective, looked like cute monster puppets on Sesame Street or like extras in an aliens movie. The pharmacists dispensed their magic from behind a loftlike wooden enclosure. Gus must have been right about the Xanax prescriptions, Olympia thought. There were at least ten people milling beneath the loft, all of them looking restless and, well, anxiety-ridden. Or was Olympia projecting her own mental state? It took five minutes to speak to a human being. Finally, Perri got her chance. “Excuse me,” she said to the white-coated man behind the counter. “I’m the daughter of one of your customers, Carol Hellinger—”
“Carol Hellinger! Of course.” He laughed. “We all get a kick out of Carol when she comes in. She mocks us to our faces. It’s really very amusing. Snake oil salesman. That’s her preferred term of abuse.” He laughed again.
“Funny,” said Perri. As if it weren’t. “Anyway, we’re wondering if she came in here an hour ago to fill a prescription for our father.”
“Haven’t seen her in months,” came the response. “But please send her my regards.”
“I will,” said Perri.
“Let’s go,” said Olympia, tugging on her sister’s sleeve.
Perri took the opportunity to shoot her sister another censorious look. Then she turned back to the pharmacist, and said, “Thank you for your time.”
Closing the door to the pharmacy behind them, Olympia was reminded of why she secretly preferred chain stores and the anonymity they promised, especially when filling her own monthly prescription for Zoloft.
They got back in the car. This time, Olympia didn’t bother asking her sister where they were going. Perri drove the rest of the way without speaking, or mostly without speaking. At one point, she mumbled, “Could this frigging light take any frigging longer?”
The emergency room was strangely empty but for a few relatives of the injured mulling about with coffees, looking bored or maybe stunned. “We’re wondering if a Carol Hellinger was brought in here tonight,” Perri asked the receptionist, a large woman with exquisite purple nails.
The receptionist scanned her notes. Then she said, “Hold on, please.” With considerable effort, she lifted her body into a standing position. Then she disappeared into a back office. Five minutes later, a “Dr. Grodberg” emerged. He was wearing a bow tie and horn-rim glasses like some parody of a boarding school teacher circa 1950. Except it was 2010, and there was no way he was older than thirty. “Are you the family of Carol Hellinger?” he asked, mispronouncing her last name. As if the final syllable began with a hard g.
Olympia felt as if a lozenge had gotten lodged in her throat. Even so, she couldn’t stand to let the error slide. “It’s Hellinger,” she said, with great emphasis on the soft g.
“Can you let the man talk?!” said Perri.
Olympia grimaced but said nothing.
“We’re her daughters,” Perri went on.
Dr. Grodberg cleared his throat and began to explain.
It turned out that the driver of a Coca-Cola truck had been rushing to make a late-day delivery in order to get home in time to celebrate his twentieth wedding anniversary with his wife. While attempting to park, he’d accidentally backed into one of the streetlamps. The impact had bent the pole and caused such a disturbance that the glass orb had slid off its base and fallen. At that same moment, Carol had been preparing to cross the street to the pharmacy. The orb had hit her smack in the forehead, causing her to lose her balance, careen onto the sidewalk, and briefly become unconscious. She had a concussion, a fractured hip (she’d fallen on her side), multiple lacerations on her face, and a badly broken leg. (Her calf had twisted behind her as she fell.) There had also been some internal bleeding, which had been stanched. The situation was not life-threatening, but it required monitoring. Further surgery might be necessary. She’d be in the hospital for several weeks at least, if not a month or two.
Olympia’s first reactions were horror and distress at the thought of her mother’s pain, followed by relief that she wasn’t about to die—not right now, at least. Those emotions, in turn, were followed by a more selfish thought: her father was going to have to move in with one of his daughters. Or one of his daughters was going to have to move back to Hastings to live with him. Despite his groundbreaking work on the origin of quark and lepton flavors, Bob Hellinger didn’t know how to boil an egg. Olympia knew instantly that she didn’t want the responsibility to fall to her. As unconditionally as she’d always loved her father, his warmth and wackiness as much as his utter obliviousness to the details of daily life, her self-protective streak was stronger.
Even as a small child, Olympia had sought out her own space and walls, establishing a secret hideaway in a tree behind the garage. It was no coincidence that she’d spent most of her twenties traveling the world, beginning with a junior year abroad in Florence. Later, there had been a waitress gig at an expat hangout in Prague, followed by the obligatory treks through Thailand and India, a photo editor stint for a Time Out start-up in Ho Chi Minh City, and a bum-around period in Baja California—anything not to be stuck at home. Yet the claustrophobia of high school in particular had never entirely lifted. Not only had Perri been just a grade ahead of her in school and Gus just a couple below, but her mother had always seemingly been right down the hall, her reading glasses attached to a red string and banging against her bosom as she walked. In self-defense, Olympia had learned a way of being—but not really being—there.
Maybe that was why, ten minutes later, standing next to her prostrate, incapacitated, and tubed-up mother, Olympia felt as if it were all happening to someone else’s family. She stood motionless, her eyes dry, her mind numb.
Perri apparently had no such inhibitions. She was sobbing loudly. “I never should have asked Mom to pick up Dad’s prescription,” she said. “I should have just gone out and done it myself. It’s all my fault!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s no one’s fault,” said Olympia, draping her arm around her older sister’s bouncing back. They stood like that for a few seconds, Olympia feeling awkward. Unlike Olympia and Gus, Olympia and Perri had never had a physical relationship, not even as little girls—maybe because Perri had always preferred to imagine herself as the third adult in the house. Olympia couldn’t ever remember seeing her cry.
Finally, Olympia felt that enough time had passed that she could remove her arm without calling attention to its absence.
Perri sniffled a few more times. Then she said, “I need to call Mike and tell him to get the guest room ready.”
Olympia read into the announcement that Bob would be moving to Larchmont with Perri—and breathed a sigh of guilty relief. “I should call home, too,” she said, pulling out her own phone. “If you think someone should stay at the hospital overnight, I could ask my sitter to spend the night. She’s never done it before but…” She glanced tentatively at Perri.
“It’s okay. Lola needs you,” said Perri, just as Olympia had hoped and thought she might say.
Ten minutes later, Olympia planted a quick kiss on Carol’s forehead and scurried out of the hospital and into a waiting taxi.