Iso and Albie loved their grandparents’ house, which was filled with the requisite items of fascination that grandparents’ homes always harbor. But the real lure for them was the nearby Rita’s custard stand. As soon as they left with their grandfather for an after-dinner treat, Eliza told her mother about Walter’s letter.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ Eliza said.
‘Doing nothing,’ Inez said, ‘is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.’
‘I know.’
‘I assumed you did.’
They were sitting on the screened porch that ran along the back of the house, a place where the view was still, more or less, as it had been when the Lerners purchased their home. They had bought it quickly, almost instinctively, a month after Eliza came home. It was actually larger than the eighteenth-century stone house they had known in Roaring Springs, and better appointed in almost every way – updated bathrooms, more generously proportioned rooms. Yet when Vonnie had come home for Christmas break, glum over her poor academic performance in her inaugural quarter at Northwestern, she had pitched a fit over her parents’ failure to consult her on this important family matter. Vonnie had always been given to histrionics, even when she had little cause for them, and her family was more or less inured to the melodrama.
But no one, not even psychiatrist parents as well trained as the Lerners, could have been prepared to hear their eldest daughter proclaim: ‘It’s just that everything’s going to be about Elizabeth – excuse me, Eliza – from now on.’
The statement, delivered at the dinner table, was wrong on so many levels that no one in the family spoke for several seconds. It was factually wrong; the whole point was that the Lerners were trying to make a world in which things were neither about, nor not about, what had happened to Eliza. Besides, they had always been fair-minded, never favoring one daughter over the other, honoring their differences. Vonnie was their high-strung overachiever. Eliza, even when she was known as Elizabeth, was that unusual child content simply to be. Good enough grades, cheerful participation in group activities in which she neither distinguished nor embarrassed herself. Inevitably, it had been speculated – by outsiders, but also by Inez and Manny, by Vonnie, and even by Eliza – that her temperament wasn’t inborn but a subconscious and preternatural decision to opt out. Let Vonnie have the prizes and the honors, the whole world if she wanted it.
From a young age, Eliza was also a willing, complacent slave to her older sister, which probably undercut whatever traditional sibling rivalry there might have been. She was simply too good- natured about the tortures her sister designed for her in their early days. Oh, when she was a baby, she cried when Vonnie pinched her, which the newly minted older sister did whenever the opportunity presented itself. But once Eliza could toddle about, she followed her sister everywhere, and not even Vonnie could hold a grudge against someone who so clearly worshipped her.
But she could – apparently, amazingly – seethe with resentment over the way her sister’s misfortune had transformed the family dynamic.
‘Would you rather be Eliza?’ her father asked Vonnie the night of her unthinkable pronouncement.
Eliza couldn’t help wanting to hear the answer. Obviously, Vonnie had never wanted to be Eliza back when she was Elizabeth, so it would be odd to think she might want to trade places now. But what if she did? What would that signify?
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Vonnie said, her anger deflating. Imploding, really, from embarrassment. ‘I was just trying to say that, from now on, so much of what we do will be controlled, influenced, affected by . . . what happened.’
‘Well, that’s true for Eliza, so I think it’s fitting that it be true for our family as a whole,’ their father said. ‘This happened to all of us. Not the same thing – there is what Eliza experienced, which is unique to her, and what your mother and I experienced, which is another. And what you felt, going off to school while this was happening, was yet another unique experience.’
Manny was always careful to use the most neutral words possible – experienced, not suffered, or even endured. Not because he was inclined to euphemisms, but because Eliza’s parents didn’t want to define her life for her. ‘You get to be the expert on yourself,’ her father said frequently, and Eliza found it an enormously comforting saying, an unexpected gift from two parents who had the knowledge, training, and history to be the expert on her, if they so chose. They probably did know her better than she knew herself in some ways, but they refused to claim this power. Sometimes she wished they would, or at least drop a few hints.
‘I was willing to defer admission,’ Vonnie reminded her father. This was accurate, as far as it went. She had offered to delay entering Northwestern, but not very wholeheartedly, and there was a risk that her parents would have to forfeit part of her tuition. Besides, now that Eliza was home, her parents were still keen on making distinctions between authentic issues, as they called them – her need to know that the house was locked at night, not so much as a window open, even on the fairest spring evenings – and rationalizations, or any attempt to use her past to unfair advantage.
Yet it was Vonnie who was inclined to leverage her sister to garner attention. Oh, she didn’t tell her new college friends too much. But she hinted at a terrible tragedy, an unthinkable occurrence, one that had made the national news. She was perhaps too broad in her allusions. Over the years, as Vonnie’s various college friends visited, they were clearly surprised to meet a normal- seeming high school girl with all her limbs and no obvious disfigurement. At least one had believed that Eliza was a young flautist, who lost her arm after being pushed in front of a subway train.
‘Remember,’ Eliza said to her mother now, ‘how Vonnie hated this house at first? Now she has a meltdown if you even suggest you might want to downsize.’
‘I think we’re still a few years away, knock wood.’ Inez did just that, rapping her knuckles on a small, rustic table that held their glasses of tea mixed with lemonade. Known as Arnold Palmers to most of the world, half-and-half at the Korean carry-outs in Baltimore, this drink had always been called Sunshines in the Lerner household. At a makeshift campsite in West Virginia, Eliza-then-Elizabeth had shown Walter how to make them. First, how to prepare the tea itself, in a jar left in the sun, then how to make homemade lemonade, with nothing more than lemons, water, and sugar. Walter thought that all juice came in frozen cans of concentrate; the lemonade proved almost too genuine, too tart, for his taste. But he had liked it, mixed with tea. ‘What do you call this?’ he’d asked Eliza, but she hadn’t wanted to tell him. ‘No name,’ she’d said. ‘Just tea and lemonade.’ ‘We should make up a name for it,’ he’d said, ‘sell it by the roadside.’ Like most of Walter’s plans, this was all talk.
‘Where will you go when you do sell this house?’ she asked her mother now.
‘Downtown D.C., I think, what they call the Penn Quarter neighborhood now.’
‘Not Baltimore?’
Inez shook her head. ‘We’ve been gone too long. We have no real ties. Besides, in D.C., we could probably give up both cars, walk most places. Theater, restaurants. You know me, it’s all or nothing, city or country, nothing in between. If I can’t see deer destroying my garden, then I want to breathe big, heavenly gulps of carbon monoxide and rotting trash, know the neighborhood