Free By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham Page A

Rebecca laughs in response.
    Bea, love of my goddamned life. How did you get to be a sad, lonely girl working at a hotel bar in Boston, wearing a red jacket, making martinis for tourists and conventioneers? Did we commit our first mistake in utero, was the name Beatrice too much for you to bear? Why did you leave school to take a job like this? If I drove you there, I’m sorry with my whole heart. With whatever’s left of my heart. I loved you. I love you. I have no idea how or when I fucked it up. If I were a better person, I suppose I’d know.
    Rebecca says, dutifully, “How’s Claire?”
    Claire is the roommate, a girl with an armload of tattoos and no discernible occupation.
    “Sorry to hear that,” Rebecca says. “I guess April really is the cruelest month. I’m going to put your father on, okay?”
    She hands him the phone. What can he do but accept it?
    “Hey, Bea,” he says.
    “Hi.”
    This is how she’s been with him lately. She’s gone from open resentment to bland friendliness, like a stewardess talking to a needy passenger. It’s worse.
    “What’s up?”
    “Nothing, really. Staying in tonight.”
    There is a spiky blossoming in his chest. He’s seen this girl’s soul, he’s seen the tiny flickering essence of her when she was brand new. He’s seen her driven to paroxysms of delight by snow, by the neighbors’ stinky Lhasa apso, by a pair of red rubber sandals. He’s consoled her over uncountable injuries, disappointments, expired pets. The fact that they are now slightly awkward acquaintances, making small talk, means the world is too strange and mysterious, too dreadful, for his own minor heart.
    “Well, that’s what we’re doing, too. Of course, we’re elderly.”
    Silence. Okay.
    “We love you,” Peter says helplessly.
    “Thanks. Bye.”
    She clicks off. Peter continues to hold the phone in his hand.
    Rebecca says, “It’s a phase. Really.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “She has to separate from you. You shouldn’t take it so personally.”
    “I’m getting worried about her. I mean, worried worried.”
    “I know. I am too, a little.”
    “What should we do?”
    “Let her be, I think. For now, anyway. Call her every Sunday.”
    Gently, Rebecca takes the phone out of Peter’s hand, puts it back on the night table.
    She says, “We seem to be a halfway house for confused children, don’t we?”
    Oh.
    The idea arrives suddenly—Rebecca prefers Mizzy. Mizzy has had the good sense to be elusive, and charming, and repentant, and (say it) beautiful. Rebecca and Peter did their best with Bea but she’d arrived so early (yes, there had been talk of an abortion, has Rebecca ever forgiven him for pressuring her?), and almost as if Bea sensed that she was not quite wanted, she was always prone to wounded solitude, to the sporadic little-girl tantrums that were replaced, during adolescence, by peevishness and outright rancor, by long condescending diatribes about the plight of the poor and the crimes of America, made extra strange by the fact that Peter and Rebecca gave to charities, and agreed with all but Bea’s most paranoid convictions, about AIDS as a government experiment, about secret prisons into which she herself might disappear some day, because she was so vocal about the conspiracies we were meant to ignore.
    How did that happen? It seems that at one moment she was a child squealing ecstatically in his arms, and the next she was a tough, sharp-faced girl with machete and pistol, come down from her village to confront him with his crimes. He was indifferent to the needs of her people, he grew fat at their expense, his glasses were pretentious, he forgot to pick up her dress at the cleaner’s.
    It seems that he missed a step. He’d been innocent and then, mysteriously, had found himself in Kafka-land, where the only questions were concerned with determining the extent of his wrongdoing, and the damages sustained.
    Peter turns to Rebecca, almost says something, but thinks better of