the stairs without it any more; even walking is a bit of a problem, off and on. No more mountain hikes for me, I’m afraid. It seems like an odd thing to be bothered by, in the circumstances, but in some ways it’s the trivial things that are the most upsetting.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”
“I know. I appreciate that. Could you put this back in the cupboard?”
We stood there for a while, watching the rhythmic turn of the spoon in the saucepan. A soft breeze, rich with earth and grass, wandered in at the French doors; behind us, Leon’s voice rose to a punch line and everyone burst out laughing. The creases and sags of Hugo’s face gave him a dozen familiar expressions at once, made him unreadable.
I felt as if there was some crucial question I should be asking him; some secret he knew that could change everything, illuminate the last terrible months and the ones to come in a new undreamed-of light that would turn them not just bearable but harmless, if only I knew how to ask. For a startling, vertiginous moment that was gone almost as soon as I recognized it, I found myself on the verge of tears.
“There,” Hugo said, moving the pan off the heat. “That should do it. Really we should let it cool for a while, but—” Turning to the room: “Who’ll have ice cream?”
* * *
The whole afternoon was very strange. There was a bizarre festive quality to it—maybe just the overlay of all those remembered celebrations, maybe the fact that so many of us hadn’t seen each other in months or years. Bowls of curly blown yellow roses everywhere, the special silverware with some forgotten ancestor’s initials on the scuffed handles, Gran’s big-occasion emerald earrings swinging and sparking from Aunt Louisa’s ears; waves of laughter and ring of glass on glass, Cheers! cheers!
In spite of the familiarity, though, there was something off-kilter about it all. People were doing the wrong things, those earrings on Louisa, Tom instead of Hugo laying out the ice-cream bowls while Hugo—a sudden gray layer of fatigue veiling his face—sat at the kitchen table, nodding at whatever Tom was gabbling about; two little blond kids who weren’t us running around among people’s legs making airplane noises and grabbing stuff off each other, Susanna quelling them with a glare exactly like the one Louisa used to throw at us; and there I was with another mimosa in my hand, nodding while my uncle Phil meandered on about the ethics of corporate tax breaks. It felt like being in one of those horror films where unspeakable entities take over the supporting characters’ bodies but not quite well enough, our hero spots the slip-ups and tumbles to the plot unfolding under his very nose— At first this was just unsettling, but as the afternoon wore on and on (the ice cream and caramel sauce, coffee, liqueurs, I didn’t want any of it and it just kept on coming) it set off an awful, swelling riptide deep inside me. Louisa bearing down on me with a gargantuan chunk of lemon poppyseed cake and a determined eye, Susanna smoothly intercepting her with a shocked “Mum! Toby’s allergic!,” Melissa gallantly vowing that lemon poppyseed was her favorite, Oliver blowing his nose cacophonously into a vast handkerchief and glowering darkly at the roses: they all looked utterly alien, these people who were supposed to be my nearest and dearest, collections of jerking limbs and colors and gurning faces that added up to nothing at all, certainly nothing to do with me. Every jostle of my elbow or movement in the corner of my eye made me leap like a spooked horse, and the constant adrenaline spikes and plummets were exhausting. I could feel that vortex opening at the base of my brain, the tension starting to build like a storm front in my spine. I had no idea how I was going to get through the rest of the day.
Somehow the plates were cleared and rinsed and loaded into the dishwasher, but no one seemed to be leaving; instead we all moved into the living room, and someone made a fresh round of mimosas. Everyone was knocking them back a little too hard. Leon was reenacting a spectacular face-off between a drag queen and a punk that he swore he’d seen in a Berlin club and that had my mother and Tom and Louisa in gales of laughter, Leon, she didn’t!