What do u want then?
A cry of floorboards from outside her door. Henry? But Henry had never had such a light footfall. He tended to stomp, especially now, raging around the house like an animal trying to get free from its own bafflement. Claudia left Nick’s last question in the folds of the sheets and, pulling on a robe, crept to the door. She cracked it open the tiniest bit, careful of the double-crossing bleat of its hinges, and peered out. She feared finding Max stationed at the opposite end of the hall like a guard on duty, wanting some ineffable thing from her, but discovered Evelyn instead. Claudia had as much cause to fear meeting her mother, maybe even more considering that Evelyn refused to pretend that the cuts Claudia inflicted had healed. To reach out to Evelyn these days was to press an open wound that oozed hostility. Claudia wouldn’t be forgiven until she’d done right, and doing right didn’t include taking refuge in her father’s study as soon as dinner was done, as if she had no other business with Max than the silent sharing of pie.
Regardless, something in Evelyn’s posture concerned her. Her mother looked out the window in the way of people who shrink from being caught looking out of windows. Claudia opened the door, letting the hinges announce her. Evelyn turned and beckoned to her impatiently in a way that said whatever beef she had with her daughter had been put on ice for the time being. When she reached the window, Claudia saw on Evelyn’s face a look of deep worry. A heavy crease trenched across her mother’s forehead, and her eyes narrowed into a squint so troubled she seemed to see something vexing beyond the vexing thing she saw. With one hand Evelyn pushed Claudia behind her to shield her from sight, and the two, like aspiring PIs, looked down on Max (in a jacket far too light for the November night) as he walked in drifting circles across the lawn.
“What’s he doing?” Claudia whispered, though there was no chance of her voice disturbing the party still going on below.
“He’s been out there for an hour,” Evelyn whispered back.
“An hour?! He’ll freeze.”
“Maybe not an hour. But Benji’s been out. Arnav’s been out. Trying to get him back inside.”
Claudia saw what her mother saw. There was, in fact, something troubling in the way Max stalked the lawn: his pace, the flimsiness of his coat, his determination to suffer the cold. She knew better than to ask what she should do.
“You go,” Evelyn said, needing no invitation to intervene. “Arnav is worried that he’s sick.”
“Sick?”
“With the bipolar.”
“I don’t know what that looks like,” Claudia said. “Neither do you.”
“Arnav certainly does. He says he can see Max ramping up.”
“What does ramping up mean?”
Evelyn ignored the question, then asked, “Is it hereditary?”
“Manic depression? I have no idea.” Claudia turned to go back to her room then turned back again. “I’m not bipolar, Mother. If that’s what you mean.”
“I’m not talking about you.”
“And neither is Nick.”
“I’m not talking about him either,” Evelyn answered distractedly.
“Who then? You? Daddy? Are you telling me you’re bipolar?”
“Is there anything you take seriously?” Evelyn asked, returning to her vigil. “Go and get your coat.”
He returned indoors with the sound of it. Max heard it playing, there, beneath all the other sounds. Beneath the cold that bit fiercely into his being and, even with a fire in the grate, refused to let go. Beneath the glee of the game going on around him. Despite the dizzying excitements and perpetual disappointments of the night. A song. A shred of song he’d needed the cold and the quiet to latch on to. Now he held it by a thread. He clung to it like a child holding a balloon in a strong wind. It threatened to whip away from him, irretrievable, at any second. Crawling back onto the couch with the smell of the night on him, he sank drunkenly into Navi’s warm arms and threw his legs over Benji’s lap. He hummed.
They chastised him, trying to rub a little warmth into his bones, as they ran their last lap through a game of Celebrity. Paul, straining to act out a famous actor without benefit of words, gave his clues with imperious speed. On his knees, he touched a finger to his heart then held it in the air.
“ET!” Benji shouted.
Paul’s encouraging nod quickly gave way to more clues. He jumped to his feet, pointing at the fireplace.
“Fireplace.”
“ET in the fireplace?”
Paul shook his head vehemently. He mimed lighting a fire.
“Matches.”
“People!” Paul clapped his hands, no nonsense. “How are matches a celebrity?!”
“No talking!” came the unanimous response.
“Start a fire.”
Nodding, nodding, reeling in the answer as if it were a large fish, Paul practically jumped into Benji’s lap.
“‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ Billy Joel!”
“Firestarter,” Claudia offered from the doorway. “Drew Barrymore.”
“Praise Jesus!” Paul said as he plopped down, a show of utter exhaustion, into a chair.
Max closed his eyes. He had the sense that they were allied against passing time, against an evening that, no matter how they drank or sang or struggled to resist, was coming to its close. His moment with Claudia had come and gone. There would be others, there might be others, but this one he felt drifting inexorably away. He kept his eyes shut and listened to the party breaking up around him, the preludes to bedtime, Benji saying, “Does everyone know where they’re sleeping?” and “Fuck the mess. Leave it for tomorrow.” They’d created a refuge of food and drink and friends and (Max said the word to himself) family, who were, even with their shortcomings, even though he barely knew them, unaccountably dear. He didn’t want it to end. But it would. It was. He wanted more. More of his family. Yes, even more of Claudia, who had yet to convince him that she was anything more than (as Amanda Davis might say) a “royal pain in the hind end.” And yet. There was something he wanted more, something that would only come to him once the others had gone. He heard his tune playing beneath the racket, those few precious notes that rose above the general din and announced themselves to his ears.
Max turned sleepily on his side, snuggling into the couch as Navi stood and tried to pull him to standing.
“You can’t sleep here,” Arnav said with a note of parental reproof.
If only Max could hold on to that delicate thread of sound, that shadow of a song that made a stitch under all the other noise.
Benji squeezed Max’s foot. Then, seeing no movement, convincing Arnav to let him be, threw a blanket over him.
Max’s mind moved heavily, slow with liquor, but suddenly there, with the music, was this:
With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then—something, something—it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.
To the Lighthouse. Cat had given a copy to Benji when Benji was in the hospital, and Benji in turn had given it to Max. A book about an artist finding her vision, Benji explained, for an artist about to find his vision. Max had read it twice, devoured it on the plane ride home, committed passages to memory, so the words he wanted now, the sweet and pitiful lament of Mrs. Ramsay as her own party came to an end, came readily to hand.
His family moved around him, clicking off lamps, gathering bags from the front hall, the loud, communal march up the stairs. Max didn’t move, trying to make out the sound that played below the roiling surface of their laughter. He lay as still as he could, trying to hear it. A few scattered notes. At first, he thought he recognized it as something they had sung earlier that evening, a snippet of Paul’s tribute to Billie Holiday twisted into another shape, but the closer he listened, the more certain he was that the notes were new. The notes were his. He didn’t know them. He wasn’t hearing them again. They’d scattered through his mind like startled birds as he crunched over the frosted grass and now, finally — thanks to Cat’s passing observation, thanks to his memory of Mrs. Ramsay bidding the night good night — they shaped themselves into a formation that sang out to him as it moved across the blank calm of the room. The phrase came to him for the first time, yet it was instantly familiar. It repeated itself. It formed like a silver-crested wave, swelling, swelling, before it folded in on itself and shattered, as on rocks, into silence. It was water moving against the shore. He kept his eyes closed and played the notes again. They were louder, more confident, drowning out the sound of footsteps overhead, over Benji’s stage-whispered promise to see them all in the morning, over Claudia (still in the room) softly saying his name. Here, at last, she was. Too late. At least for the night, too late. He pretended she wasn’t there.