All through those years I’d been looking at my palm. I was meant for a good life—that was what the lines meant.
I remembered how, a year before, my mother had come to visit me in New York. She was getting over the illness that had left her fragile and her ears clogged. We went for a walk in the late afternoon.
West Fourth Street intersected Charles Street at a brick row house covered in light. My mother and I stopped to gaze at it together. Those days we had started to have the feeling that we had survived, we had made it through, we would be happy.
“And the palms? Do you even know how to read palms?” I’d built up the courage to ask.
“Sort of,” she said, a slight smile that meant she was lying.
“I mean, do you have any expertise?” What I wanted her to say was she’d met someone in India or she’d read a rare book.
“You needed the right stories. We needed to get to a radically different place from where we were. I didn’t know how else to get us there, besides stories. And anyway, the things I was saying—they were true.”
That evening, back at the house, he called me in with the weak voice he used to call the nurses. “Lis.” The backpack that held the bag of TPN was whirring its motor, ticking like a toy train around a track, the milky fluid going into his veins. He was lying on the bed with his knees up, propped up on pillows. He was freakishly thin; it was hard to look at him and think of anything else besides his limbs, his gaunt face.
“About what we said earlier—” he said. It struck me how he referenced a previous conversation about emotions, something he’d never done with me before. “I want to say something: You were not to blame.” He started to cry. “If only we’d had a manual. If only I’d been wiser. But you were not to blame. I want you to know, you were not to blame for any of it.” He’d waited to apologize until there was hardly anything left of him. This was what I’d been waiting to hear. It felt like cool water on a burn.
“I’m so sorry, Lis,” he cried and shook his head side to side. He was sitting up, cradling his head in his hands, and because he had shrunk and lost fat, his hands looked disproportionately large, and his neck too thin to hold his skull, like one of the Rodin sculptures of the burghers of Calais. “I wish I could go back. I wish I could change it. But it’s too late. What can I do now? It’s just too late.” He cried and his body shook. His breath caught on his sobs and I wished he’d stop. After that he said again, “I owe you one.” I didn’t know what to say. I kept sitting beside him on his bed. Even now I didn’t quite trust it: if by some miracle he recovered, I imagined he’d snap back to his old self, forget this happened, go back to treating me as he had before.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said. “Maybe, if there is a next time, we could be friends?” It was also a gentle jab: just friends. But in fact, in the weeks following this visit and after he died, it was our missed chance at friendship I grieved about.
“Okay,” he said. “But I’m so sorry. I owe you one.”
Since returning the stolen objects, I hadn’t taken anything else, but I’d still noticed other things I wanted. Now the wanting dried up. I never felt like stealing again.
The family returned and the house was bustling. In the evening after dinner, Laurene and I were alone at the kitchen table together. On other visits I would have hopped up to wash the dishes, but this time I stayed where I was. “He talked to me,” I said. “We exchanged important words. Momentous words. I feel better.” I thought she would ask me about it, but instead she got up to wash a dish at the sink.
“I don’t believe in deathbed revelations,” she said.
My younger sister Eve was having a birthday party. I wandered out into the garden that smelled of succulents, geraniums, and water. A cluster of girls stood on the darkening lawn, with some light still in the sky, like a Magritte painting.
My sister had tied low strings like trip wires over the surface of the large outdoor trampoline to imitate horse jumps, and she and her friends did jumps on arms and legs across the surface. Birds flew into the eaves of the house, and the pug grunted and rooted around beside the trampoline legs.
“Who are you?” one girl asked me. She was a few inches taller than my sister, up to my nose, hair like straw. My sister climbed off the trampoline and stood nearby.
“I’m the sister of the birthday girl,” I said. The friend looked confused, maybe because we are twenty-one years apart. “I’m much older because we have different mothers,” I said, to explain.
“Oh,” the girl said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“She was daddy’s mistake,” my sister announced.
I grabbed her shoulders for a minute to steady myself, her back against my chest. “You shouldn’t say that,” I whispered in her ear, and then walked back into the house through the dark.
Inside, there was a honey jar on the kitchen table, and I leaned closer to inspect the label. On it were five illustrations of bees with the names of the family members written underneath each: Steve, Laurene, Reed, Erin, and Eve. Above them was the title “Jobs Family Farm.”
The next day, in a drawer below the napkins, I found a cluster of many of these labels, each with an adhesive back. They were for gifts, I figured. There were so many labels that they clung together and fanned out like the fall leaves raked into tight piles on the streets around here. I kept looking at the labels, searching for my name among the bees, as if it might appear there. In the dining hall in college, a girl had said, half-joking, “The trick must be to marry rich. How do we marry rich?” and I’d felt the same heaviness of being outside the circle of fun.
In the past couple of years, I’d moved to New York, finished an MFA at Bennington College, started a consulting job at a graphic design firm editing and designing a section of the MoMA website, and moved in with a man I loved and hoped to marry. I had grown up, I had moved on, so it surprised me, returning to see my father when he was sick, how painful it still was not to be included in his life.
Visiting reminded me that while I’d lived at this house, I’d wished to be someone else. But around this time—during one of these visits during these strange years flying here to visit my father every month or so—I had a moment of revelation, a moment of lightness, as if a huge burden I’d been carrying around had been lifted all at once as I was standing under the frill of jasmine around the front door: It was irrelevant that I wasn’t named on the honey-pots. I had not been a mistake. I was not the useless part of something meaningful. I heard from someone that the pattern of our breath isn’t supposed to be even, regular. Humans are not metronomes. It goes long and short, deep and shallow, and that’s how it’s supposed to go, depending at each moment on what you need, and what you can get, and how filled up you are. I wouldn’t trade any part of my experience for someone else’s life, I felt then, even the moments where I’d wished I didn’t exist, not because my life was right or perfect or best, but because the accumulation of choices made had carved a path that was characteristic and distinct, down to the serif, and I felt the texture of it all around me for just a moment, familiar, like my own skin, and it was good enough.