Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Finally, every last bag from the nonstop TWA flight from Los Angeles to Dulles had slid onto the conveyor belt and been pulled away by the waiting travelers. There was nothing left to claim. The crowd dispersed and she caught sight of Albie trying to pry an ancient piece of chewing gum off the floor with what from a distance almost looked like a knife. She turned away.

“Okay,” she said, calculating the time of day and the traffic back to Arlington. “I guess the bags didn’t make the flight. That’s not a problem. We’ll just have to go to the office and fill out some paperwork. Did you keep the claim checks?” she said to Holly. Best to just direct everything to Holly, who seemed to have a natural desire to please. Holly was her only real chance.

“We don’t have any claim checks,” Holly said. She had very pale skin and dark straight hair, a face full of freckles. She had the kind of Pippi Longstocking looks adults found charming and other kids made fun of.

“But you had them at some point. Didn’t your mother give you the claim checks?”

Holly started again. “We don’t have any claim checks because we don’t have any luggage.”

“What do you mean you don’t have any luggage?”

“I mean we don’t have any.” Holly didn’t see how she could be any clearer than that.

“You mean you forgot it in Los Angeles? You lost it?” Beverly was distracted. She was looking for Cal and didn’t see him. There were signs every ten feet warning people not to sit or stand on the carousels.

Holly’s lip trembled slightly but her stepmother failed to notice. Holly had thought there was something fishy about taking a trip without bags, but her mother had assured her this was the way their father wanted it. He wanted them to have everything new — new clothes, new toys, new bags in which to carry home the loot. Maybe he’d just forgotten to tell Beverly. “We didn’t bring any,” she said quietly.

Beverly looked down at her. Goddamn Bert for saying she could manage this no problem. “What?”

It was terrible to have been made to say it once, unforgivable to be made to say it again. Tears welled up in Holly’s eyes and started their run across the freckles. “We. Don’t. Have. Any. Luggage.” Now she would be in trouble with her father and she hadn’t even seen her father yet. What was worse, her father would be mad at her mother again. Her father had been calling her mother irresponsible forever but she wasn’t.

Beverly’s eyes shot from one end of the baggage claim to the other. The passengers and the people who had met them were thinning out, two of her stepchildren were missing, the third stepchild was crying and the fourth was so consumed by the vinyl strap of her handbag it was hard not to assume she was handicapped. “Then why have we been standing at the baggage carousel for the last half hour?” Beverly didn’t raise her voice. She wasn’t mad yet. She’d be mad later when she had time to think about it but for now she simply didn’t understand.

“I don’t know!” Holly screamed, her eyes streaming. She pulled up the hem of her T-shirt and wiped it across her nose. “It’s not my fault. You brought us down here. I never said we had luggage.”

Jeanette unzipped the zipper on her little purse, dug around, and handed her sister a tissue.

Every year Beverly’s second trip to the airport was worse because she always thought it was going to be better. She left her four step-children at home (first with her mother, then Bonnie, then Wallis, and now under Cal’s supervision. They stayed home alone in Torrance after all, and Arlington was safer than Torrance) and drove back to Dulles to reclaim her girls. While Bert’s children came east for the entire summer, Caroline and Franny traveled west for two short weeks: one with Fix and then one with her parents, just enough time to remind the girls how greatly they preferred California to Virginia. They shuffled off the plane looking like they were in an advanced state of dehydration from having cried for the entirety of their flight. Beverly dropped to her knees to hug them but they were nothing but ghosts. Caroline wanted to live with her father. She begged for it, she pleaded, and year after year she was denied. Caroline’s hatred for her mother radiated through the cloth of her pink camp shirt as her mother pressed Caroline to her chest. Franny on the other hand simply stood there and tolerated the embrace. She didn’t know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.

Beverly kissed their heads. She kissed Caroline again as Caroline pulled away from her. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she said.

But Caroline and Franny were not glad they were home. They were not glad at all. It was in this battered state that the Keating girls returned to Arlington to be reunited with their stepsiblings.

Holly was certainly friendly. She hopped up and down and actually clapped her hands when the girls came through the door. She said she wanted to put on another dance recital in the living room this summer. But Holly was also wearing Caroline’s red T-shirt with the tiny white ribbon rosette at the neck, which her mother had made Caroline put in the Goodwill bag before she left because it was both faded and too small. Holly was not the Goodwill.

Caroline had the bigger room with two sets of bunk beds, and Franny, being smaller, had the smaller room with twin beds. The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side. Two girls and one bathroom was a workable situation from the beginning of September through the end of May, but in June when Caroline and Franny returned from California they found Holly and Jeanette had made themselves at home in one set of bunk beds while Franny had lost her room completely to the boys. It was four girls in one room and the two boys in the other with a bathroom the size of a phone booth for the six of them to share.

Caroline and Franny lugged their luggage up the stairs. Luggage: that which is to be lugged. They passed the open door of the master bedroom where Cal was lying across their mother’s bed, his dirty feet in dirty socks resting on the pillows, watching a tennis match at top volume. They were never allowed to go into the master bedroom or sit on the bed, even if they kept their feet on the floor, nor were they allowed to watch television without an express invitation. Cal didn’t lift his eyes from the screen or give the smallest recognition of their arrival as they passed.

Holly was behind them, close enough to bump when they stopped walking. “I was thinking that all four of us could dance in white nightgowns. Would that be okay? We could start practicing this afternoon. I’ve got some ideas about the choreography if you want to see.”

As for there being four girls in the dance recital, only three were in evidence. Jeanette was MIA. No one had noticed she was gone, but Franny’s cat Buttercup was missing as well. Buttercup had not come to the door to greet Franny as surely she would have after two weeks away. Buttercup, the lifeline to normalcy, was gone. Beverly, drowning in the sea of child-life, had no clear memory of the last time she’d seen the cat, but Franny’s sudden, paralyzing sobs prompted her to do a thorough search of the house. Beverly found Jeanette beneath a comforter on the floor in the back of the linen closet (how long had Jeanette been missing?). She was petting the sleeping cat.

“She can’t have my cat!” Franny cried, and Beverly leaned down and took the cat from Jeanette, who hung on for only half a second and then let go. The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtrack”: