The Last Romantics
The Last Romantics
Tara Conklin
Sweeping and epic, The Last Romantics is an unforgettable portrait of one perfectly imperfect family – the Skinner siblings – and how the consequences of one fateful summer will change their lives forever.The stunning new novel from the New York Times bestselling author, Tara Conklin.Meet the Skinner siblings: fierce Renée, dreamy Caroline, golden boy Joe and watchful Fiona.Their story begins with the sudden death of their father and a period known as The Pause; one free and feral summer spent at the neighbourhood pond, which will bind the Skinners tightly together, and irrevocably shape the course of their lives.Two decades later, the adult siblings have scattered. But tragedy will draw them back together once again. They’ll be forced to question the life choices they’ve made and ask what, exactly, they will do for love.Beautifully told with warmth and heartbreak, The Last Romantics is a compelling story about family, the ways in which four siblings grow together & apart, the thousand little ways in which they can betray one another – but also how they’ll always find home.
Copyright (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Tara Conklin 2019
From Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf
Published by Hogarth Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 1985
Excerpt of three lines from “The Applicant” from Ariel by Sylvia Plath.
Copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
‘Maps’: Words and Music by Karen Orzolek, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase
Copyright © 2003 Chrysalis Music Ltd.
All Right Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved; Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Cover design by Ploy Siripant © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration by Joel Holland
Tara Conklin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008323349
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008323356
Version: 2019-01-12
Dedication (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Dedicated to the memory of Luella Briody Conklin
and Kenneth Jerome Conklin
For my sisters
Epigraph (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
—Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.
—Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Contents
Cover (#ucaed2190-013d-5d2a-a71c-47c45141c07e)
Title Page (#u210cb9cf-ca70-5f52-9018-ba95f958a8ea)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Year 2079
Part I: Bexley (#u21d5ef27-8f6d-5275-9cab-69d43ca35a38)
Chapter 1 (#u95589c2b-5aa1-55e1-972c-869c4115c013)
Chapter 2 (#u5c9480ba-36c0-573f-931c-81d11f367b64)
Chapter 3 (#u7d0f8f5e-63a9-55f8-98d4-efc528813ea9)
Chapter 4 (#u838c3111-dd28-5914-aee9-41953b198acf)
Part II: New York City (#u31bff54a-f2c8-5e36-a986-2974762cab02)
Year 2079 (#ub294129c-5af1-5191-a862-f9cf688185f8)
Chapter 5 (#u7f0d31e1-094c-5058-b1b8-671966cd9829)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III: Miami (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: After (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Tara Conklin (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
AT FIRST I believed the girl to be an apparition. A ghost. She rose from the crowd in the auditorium and walked to the microphone.
I remained very still. For the past ninety minutes, I had been seated onstage to discuss my body of work. As much as I dread large crowds, the event had been a success. The audience was respectful, intelligent, curious. I’d even made them laugh. That joke about the frog, of all things. We heard the sirens only once, a brief wail during which I paused my reading. We all waited, the thousand here in the auditorium and the thousands more watching via satellite and DTR. We waited, and then the sirens quieted, and I resumed with my poem.
Afterward the questions. So many questions! My first public event in twenty-five years—of course there would be questions, but I was not prepared for the intensity, the thoroughness with which these people had read my work. It still surprises me now, eighty years into this literary experiment, that my words might mean something to anyone other than myself.
I am 102 years old and a poet of some renown. My name is Fiona Skinner.
When the girl stepped forward, my attention was elsewhere. My energy low. I wondered what snack Henry had waiting for me backstage and hoped it was the candy with the peanut butter in the center, my favorite. My thoughts fixed on other comforts: the tall, soft bed in my house in the mountains; the river stocked with trout; the deep, cold well; the generator with its soothing hum. We never heard the sirens there, no, the nearest town was too far. It was a safe place, our house, a place beyond the reach of politics and rising oceans. At least that’s what I chose to believe. It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.
The girl at the microphone was an arresting sight: slender and tall, a dark bob cut short and sharp to her chin. She looked eighteen, perhaps twenty years old. Not a girl, then, nearly a woman.
The crowd was silent. She coughed into her hand. “Ms. Skinner,” she began. “My name is Luna.”
“Luna?” I said, and my voice caught, my breath stilled. For a moment I traveled back all those years to a different place and time. At last, I thought. Luna has returned.
“Yes. My mother named me after the last line of The Love Poem,” she said.
“Oh, of course.” I smiled. Henry had told me about this, the popularity of the name. The Love Poem had that effect on some readers. They wanted to keep a piece of it. And here was one of those babies, now grown, standing before me. Another Luna.
The girl’s face was half in shadow. I saw a mole high on her right cheek. About the size of a dime. A birthmark. A dark kiss.
“My mother always wanted to ask you about the name,” Luna continued. “She’d memorized the last pages at school. When my brother and I were little, she’d recite them at dinner if we were feeling down.” Her face became soft with the memory. “The Love Poem meant so much to her. I want to know, for my mother. Who was your inspiration? Who was Luna?”
The auditorium went still. Onstage the lights had become hot, but a cold spread through me, ice flooding my veins. I shivered. A sweat rose along my hairline. It was a question I’d always refused to answer publicly. And privately; even Henry didn’t know the truth. But of course I should have expected it tonight. Isn’t that why I’d agreed to speak one last time? Isn’t that why I was here? To finally tell this story.
An old regret lodged in my throat, blocking my voice. I coughed.
“Luna is the Spanish word for moon, of course,” I said. “In the poem itself, there are many metaphors, many symbols that mean different things. I wrote it seventy-five years ago, my dear. Your mother, you, anyone here”—I waved my palm at the audience—“you know what the poem means more than I do now.”
The Luna standing before me shook her head in frustration. A lock of hair fell into her eyes, and she pushed it away. “No. I mean the real woman. My mother always said there was someone named Luna.”
I straightened my spine and heard the bones crack, a minor internal disruption. I wasn’t often put on the spot. At home I had a gardener, a personal assistant, a housekeeper, a cook. I lived with my second husband, Henry, but I ran the house and gave the orders. Some might say I’m imposing. I prefer to think of it as self-assured. This girl was also self-assured, I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the purse of her lips.
How to describe the first Luna? I met Luna Hernandez only once. On a night when the wind threw tree branches onto the road and leaves whirled in crazy circles. Decades ago, a lifetime ago. That Luna had grown and changed in my mind until I hardly saw her anymore. Were her eyes brown or gray? The mole, was it high on the right cheek or the left? Had it been remorse I saw on her face that night or merely dismissal?
“I wrote a poem about love,” I began, addressing the crowd. “But there are certain limitations. There are certain failings. I’ve always been wary of love, you see. Its promises are too dizzy, its reasons too vague, its origins murkier than mud.” Here I heard a chuckle from the audience. “Yes, mud!” I called in the direction of the laugh. “When I was young, I tried dissecting love, setting it up on a table with a good strong light and poking, prodding, slicing. For years I believed it possible to identify the crux, the core, and that once you found this essential element you might tend it like a rose and grow something beautiful. Back then I was a romantic. I didn’t understand that there’s no stopping betrayal. If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”
I paused.
“You’re not answering the question,” Luna said; her arms were now crossed against her chest, her chin down.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. “In these difficult times, stories are important. In a sense, stories are all we have to tell us about the future.”
Luna moved away from the microphone. She was listening intently, everyone was, shoulders pitched just slightly forward, curious and alert.
“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a father and a mother and four children, three girls and one boy. They lived together in a house like any other house, in a town like many other towns, and for a time they were happy.” I paused, and all those faces in the auditorium stared down on me, all those eyes. “And then—” I stopped again, faltering. I sipped my glass of water. “And then there was the Pause. Everything started there. Our mother didn’t mean for it to happen, she didn’t, but this is a story about the failures of love, and the Pause was the first.”
PART I (#ulink_028d1112-3e63-5d31-b4c9-192a104fa2b6)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_4444ca04-eeaa-52cb-960c-6ab82ba34176)
IN THE SPRING of 1981, our father died. His name was Ellis Avery Skinner, thirty-four years old, a small bald lozenge at the back of his head that he covered every morning with a few hopeful strands. We lived in the middle-class town of Bexley, Connecticut, where our father owned and operated a dental practice. At the moment his heart stopped, he was pulling on a pair of blue rubber gloves while one of his afternoon patients, a Mrs. Lipton, lay before him on the padded recliner, breathing deeply from a sweet mask of chloroform.
“Oh!” our father said, and toppled sideways to the floor.
“Dr. Skinner?” Mrs. Lipton sat up. She was unsteady, groggy, and afraid as she looked down at our father on the floor. He twitched once, twice, and then Mrs. Lipton began to scream.
The look on his face, she later reported to our mother, was one of surrender and absolute surprise.
Our mother was thirty-one years old. She’d never held a full-time job and possessed a degree in English literature from Colby College in her home state of Maine that sat unframed in an upstairs closet. Her dark hair hung like two pressed curtains framing the window of her face. Her eyes were wide and brown, with sparse lashes and narrow lids that gave an impression of watchfulness and exposure. Her name was Antonia, though everyone called her Noni, and it was decided long before my birth that her children should call her Noni, too.
The day of our father’s funeral was dank, mid-March. Ronald Reagan was president, the Cold War dragged on, Star Wars had made us all believe in forces we could not see. At that time Bexley was a town where people greeted each other by name at the post office or the bank and no one cared who had money and who did not. The doctor and the mill worker both visited my father for root canals, and both drank beer at the same drafty tavern. The dark Punnel River meandered along the east side of town and gave us something to do on summer days. This was still the era when a ninety-minute commute to New York City seemed absurd, and so the people who lived in Bexley, for the most part, worked in Bexley.
It was no surprise when the whole town turned out for our father’s funeral. Hundreds, it seemed to me. Thousands. Noni led us through that awful day with an iron grip on two of our eight hands. She alternated, she did not play favorites. She had four children, and we all needed to feel the warmth of her palm.
Renee, the eldest of us, was eleven years old. Long, thin limbs, chestnut hair she wore in a single braid down her back. Even as a child, Renee exuded competence and self-containment, and at the funeral she was no different. She did not cry or make a fuss when her tights ran up the back. She helped Noni with us, the younger ones, and tried not to look directly at the casket.
After Renee came Caroline, who was eight, and then Joe, who was seven. Caroline was the fairest of us, with cheeks pink as bubble gum and hair that streaked blond in the summers. Joe was the boy, the only boy, with floppy hands and large feet and a stubborn right-side cowlick that he was forever flipping away from his face. Joe and Caroline both had a tawny glow and quick, broad grins and were mistaken so frequently for twins that sometimes even they forgot there was a year between them.
And then came me, Fiona, the youngest, four years and eight months old on the day our father died. I was a pudgy child with soft, dimpled knees and unruly reddish hair that frizzed and flamed around my freckled face. My looks contrasted so vividly with those of my lithe, golden siblings that neighbors raised eyebrows. A tilt of the head, a shadow of gossipy doubt passing behind the eyes. Bexley, Connecticut, was like that. Working-class New Englanders starched in Puritan ethics. Their nails were dirty, but their souls were clean. After our father’s death, the gossip stopped. Widowhood trumped the suggestion of infidelity. In her grief Noni became infallible, untouchable.
I remember very little about my father while he was alive, but the day we buried him I recall in great detail. At the cemetery a racket of crows flew above the casket. Our priest, Father Johns, delivered remarks in tones that rose and fell like a fitful storm; I could not understand a word of it. The ground was mushy with thaw, but crusts of snow still lurked beneath trees and along the shadowy side of the marble mausoleum that sat up on a low hill behind the grave site.
The mausoleum resembled a house: front steps, a peaked roof, the appearance of windows. It was so much larger and more impressive than the tidy headstone Noni had chosen for our father’s grave. I was more interested in the mausoleum than I was in Father Johns, and so I ran away from the funeral, around the back of the crowd, and up the hill. The mausoleum stones were a deep gray, speckled with rain spots and age, significant and somber. Along the top I sounded out the name GARRISON H. CLARK. And then: BELOVED FATHER, HUSBAND, SON, BROTHER, COLLEAGUE, FRIEND.
Down the small hill, Father Johns spoke in a dull, deep voice. From a distance, finally, I could make out the words:
“Too soon …”
“Great burden …”
“Do not ask …”
Noni’s head was bowed; she hadn’t noticed my absence. Noni was Catholic and felt it in her knees that ached from all the praying but not, she realized that day, in her heart. This was the last time she would entertain the rituals of organized religion, the last day she would bow her head to the words of a man wearing white.
From my position on the hill, the mourners looked similar to the crows, only bigger and quieter, perched on the yellowish green of the spring grass that cut abruptly to the darkness of earth beside the casket. I thought of how little space there was on our father’s stone. How unassuming it was, how meager, nothing like Garrison H. Clark’s showy marble mausoleum. Standing beneath a stranger’s name, gazing down at my father’s funeral, for the first time that day I began to cry.
* * *
WE LIVED IN a yellow house, a three-story Colonial on a street lined with arching maples and oaks that threw down acorns in the spring and curling red and orange leaves in the fall. There was a steep, clattery staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs and a basement that smelled faintly of mold and scorched sheets. In the backyard we had a metal swing set, and a sandbox used regularly by the neighborhood cats, and flower beds of nasturtium, lavender, gardenia, and clematis tended diligently by Noni.
After our father’s funeral, people began to arrive at the yellow house. Everyone from church and others, too, people I had never seen before, people who knew my name and crouched to say it: “Fiona! Darling Fi!”
Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Granger, took the plates covered in plastic wrap, the Tupperware containers in pastel shades, and bustled away to place them on the dining-room table. It struck me as odd to see Mrs. Granger perform this role, which seemed more properly to belong to Noni. But she remained on the orange couch, a white handkerchief moving from face to lap, face to lap, as strangers knelt before her, bowing their heads as though she bestowed upon them some sort of honor. She had never looked less like our mother.
The black of Noni’s dress, the orange of the couch, and the white of the handkerchief reminded me of Halloween, and I felt a strange, empty excitement. A near hysteria. Plus all the food. Everywhere! Bowls of green grapes and Chex Mix and hard butterscotch candies and potato chips. Platters of ham-and-cheese sandwiches cut into neat triangles, cubes of watermelon that leaked pink juice onto the white tablecloth. I grabbed what I could and ate it quickly, unsure as to what was permitted here, what would be allowed.
It soon became clear that anything was allowed when your father has died. I spied Joe beneath a table with an entire bowl of hard candies and three cans of Coca-Cola. Caroline took off her tights and sprawled on the floor, singing to herself; Renee sat on a rocking chair and picked with great concentration at an elbow scab, ignoring the adult who stood before her, saying her name again and again in a calm, sympathetic voice.
I ran crazily around the room. I slapped various bottoms and did not apologize. I picked my nose and wiped my finger on the coffee table. No one stopped me or spoke to me or noticed me at all. The freedom was exhausting. I climbed unsteadily into Renee’s lap. She wore a stiff black dress and black tights that she pulled at as I settled against her. With a shoeless toe, she rocked the chair back and forth, back and forth. The movement soothed me like a ship on the sea or a car on a bumpy road. This is how I would always imagine Renee: as a steadiness in times of turmoil.
I was on Renee’s lap when it began. I don’t know what triggered Joe’s fury. I know only that he got hold of a fireplace poker, sooty at its tip, cast iron, heavy. About the length of a baseball bat.
Joe began in the dining room and moved steadily, ferociously through the house. He did not strike people, only things. There was the sound of wood splintering, glass shattering, dull thumps and sickening crashes as he brought the poker down again and again on a table, a chair, those many bowls and platters of food. The noise startled me, but I didn’t cry. I listened. We all listened. Muted conversations and quiet tears gave way to a nervous, cowardly hush.
Crash. Into the living room he came. The crystal bowl full of hard candies, the porcelain table lamp with a linen shade, Noni’s collection of delicate glassware cats—all crashed and shattered to the floor. Joe paused before the piano, and then he took aim at the photographs that stood on top: pictures of what we, the Skinners, had been until that day. Six together. Ellis and Antonia, Renee and Caroline and Joe and little Fiona. Crash. Six together on windswept New England beaches and before tinselly Christmas trees, grinning and mugging, arms over shoulders, holding hands. Crash. We were gap-toothed children and anonymous infants, full-cheeked within our swaddles. Our parents were proud and exhausted, bright, blameless, beautiful even in their polyester and plaid. Crash. All of it, gone.
I waited for someone to stop Joe, but no one did. The room echoed with the noise of his destruction, grunts and strained inhalations, but otherwise there was silence. No one spoke. No one moved to stop him. Even Noni remained on the couch, her face pale and stricken. I wondered then, and I would wonder for the rest of my life: why did our mother not take the poker from Joe’s grasp, wrap her arms around him, tell him that everything would be okay?
Finally Joe paused. At seven years old, he already stood four feet tall. A borrowed black suit showed his pale ankles and pale, knobby wrists. Plaster dust had settled in his hair, onto the shoulders of his suit, ghosting his skin. With a free hand, he wiped sweat from his forehead.
Then a man’s voice called out. To this day I have no idea who spoke, but one could say he changed the course of Joe’s life, of all our lives. “Antonia,” the voice said. “Your boy’s got quite an arm. It’d be a shame if he didn’t play some baseball.”
Someone chuckled. A child began to cry. With a dull thud, Joe dropped the poker. Renee removed me from her lap, and went to him. “Joe,” she said. His hands shook, and she took one in her own. Caroline sprinted across the room in her bare feet and threw her arms around him. I followed, stumbling like a drunk from sleepiness and overstimulation, and wrapped myself around Joe’s calves and feet.
I believe this was the moment when we each assumed responsibility for our brother, Joe. A lifelong obligation of love that each of us, for different reasons, would not fulfill. We would try: Renee in her studied, worrisome way; Caroline carelessly with great bursts of energy followed by distraction; and myself, quiet and tentative, assuming that Joe would never need me, not in the way that I needed him. Years later this assumption would prove to be wrong. But by then it would be too late.
* * *
THE FIRST THING Noni did after all the funeral food was eaten and we had returned to school was to inquire about Little League baseball for Joe. She could focus on one thing at a time, she thought. If she tried to fix everyone all at once, she would fail, she would fall to the floor and never get up again. It’s important to take small steps. This was what Mrs. Cooperton, our neighbor the social worker, told her at the funeral. One day at a time. Cross one thing off your list at a time.
Noni worried that Joe would lack a strong male presence in his life, and that worry eclipsed all others. Her inquiries returned the name of a baseball coach, Marty Roach, who was famous in Bexley. For twenty-three years he’d taught young boys the nature of teamwork and the beauty of a well-thrown ball. His office, Noni had heard, was festooned with birthday cards sent by former players, men now, who had moved on to cities and careers but harbored an enduring affection for old Coach Marty. This was what Noni wanted. Someone who would endure for Joe.
“Looks like the roster’s already full,” the man on the phone told her. “But for you, Mrs. Skinner, we can fit one more.”
Noni brought us all to that first practice. The team met at the Bexley High School playing field, which was rough, chewed-up grass bordered to the north by a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence lay thick scrub, densely packed bushes, brambles, and spindly pines that eventually thickened and stretched into the forest that covered Packensatt Peak, the closest thing to a mountain that Bexley could claim. High-school kids liked to jump the fence and wander into this wilderness to smoke and drink and light fires and have faltering, unforgettable sex. Noni looked across the field to the tangled trees and saw a defensive line holding steady against an encroaching disorder.
On the field a dozen boys stood in a row, a loose knot of fathers beside them. The air smelled of wet leaves and sweetness from the mulch that sat in huge piles around the field’s southern perimeter, spring preparation for later plantings. Off to the side was Marty Roach. Maybe it was the suggestion of the surname, but I had never before seen a man who so closely resembled an insect. He was short and stocky, with burly shoulders, a dark, ample mustache, and large meat-hook hands. Sparse black hair striped the white dome of his scalp, and I thought that at any moment antennae would sprout from his forehead. He looked designed to survive in hardy conditions, to find forgotten crumbs in a clean kitchen. Noni shook his hand uneasily.
“Hiya, Joe,” he said, leaning down to look my brother in the eye. “Ready to play?” He inclined his head toward the row of boys.
Joe nodded once and stepped away from Noni, took his place in line.
“Now, boys,” Marty said, stretching his arms out wide. “Today is our first day as a team. We are all learning our roles. As teammates you will come to rely on one another. You will come to know one another like brothers.” Coach Marty paused. “But for today let’s just have some fun.”
We sat in the stands with Noni and watched as boys threw balls to their fathers with loose, inelegant gestures. Marty stood alone with Joe and showed him how to hold a bat, swing evenly from the waist, trap a ball within the webbed leather of his glove. After a spell the boys divided into teams and began to scrimmage. Joe positioned himself in center field, just behind second base, where he looked both in the thick of it and dismally alone. Poor Joe, I thought. He stepped from one foot to the other, rubbed his nose, took off his hat and put it on again. The other players laughed or talked or waved to their fathers. Oh, poor Joe.
Batters took their turns at the plate. There were futile swings, dropped bats, tears. Finally a round-bellied blond stepped up. He was short but powerful, clearly experienced. A father lobbed a gentle pitch, the boy swung hard, and—crack—the ball arced forward into the field. And then, all at once, it was Joe like a toy on a spring who came up high to catch the ball. The force of the ball hitting Joe’s glove—whomp—took me by surprise.
The blond boy pulled up from running, a look of shock and dismay on his face.
“Wow! Great catch!” Marty called to Joe.
We clapped wildly, my sisters and Noni and I. Joe gave us a small wave. He smiled. Beside me on the bleachers, I felt Noni expand in the way of a hungry lung filling at last with air. She waved back at Joe.
* * *
AFTER BASEBALL BEGAN for Joe, one worry relaxed but others rose up to replace it.
Sometimes after dinner I heard Noni muttering. “One thing at a time,” she would say. “One thing. One thing.”
The casseroles stopped appearing on our doorstep. Our teachers stopped asking how we were holding up and gazing at us with grave, kindly faces. I slept soundly now. Joe and Renee, too. Only Caroline still suffered nightmares, terrifying dreams of darkness and a child with evil eyes. But after a spell, we became accustomed to Caroline’s bad dreams, and so it seemed, in a way, a return to normalcy.
One thing at a time. One thing.
Sometimes Noni yelled and threw objects at the wall—pencils and books and staplers. Papers littered the kitchen table and the study and Noni’s bedroom. At night Noni worried over a big gray calculator. We wandered in and kissed her and asked her to put us to bed, but she would say, “In a minute, just give me a minute,” and so we put ourselves to bed. We fell asleep atop the covers to the sound of Noni punching numbers with a jagged index finger, sharp and insistent.
Three months after our father died, we moved from our yellow house to a gray one-story ranch six miles away. This house had no stairs or swing set or much of a backyard, only a strip of gravel and a rectangle of sparse, yellowed grass that backed against a tall wooden fence. In the front yard sat a single tree, a large, humbling locust that threw a rough blanket of shade over the house. We loved our yellow house and cried more bitterly for this loss than we had for our father.
“We have no money,” Noni explained. “I’m sorry. Your daddy never told me we were out of money.”
It was June when we moved. School was out. Low-relief mounds of mosquito bites marked my legs, red and itchy and bleeding from my attentions. On that sticky, heavy day, we all rode with Noni in the long front seat of the U-Haul. Joe sat closest to the window, and he alone craned his neck to watch the yellow house disappear behind us.
We helped Noni unpack the towels and sheets, the plates and silverware, our summer clothes, our books. Renee and Caroline would now share a room. Joe was down the hall, closest to the bathroom. I would sleep in a small, tucked-away space that had a low ceiling and no windows. Our old things looked wrong in the new rooms. At any moment I expected someone—our father perhaps—to pop out from behind a door and say Surprise! or What a hoot!, which were things our father used to say.
For dinner that first night, we sat on the couch and ate spaghetti with sauce from a jar. Accidentally we had arranged ourselves by age: Renee beside Caroline beside Joe beside me. I was wearing my nightgown, a short one, and the nubby orange upholstery itched against the backs of my thighs. The skin around our mouths was stained pink from the tomato sauce.
“Kids,” Noni said. She was standing in front of the couch. Unpacked boxes lined the walls. In the kitchen dirty dishes filled the sink.
“Yes?” said Renee.
“Kids,” Noni said again. “I’m feeling tired. Very tired.” Her hair hung lank around her face, her eyes gazed out from deep inside her head. The bones around her neck were thin and pronounced. They looked delicate, easy to break.
“I need some rest,” Noni said. “Okay?” She gazed from one of us to the other, her eyebrows up.
Caroline, Joe, and I all turned to Renee: she was the eldest, she was the one who knew how to answer our mother.
“Don’t worry, Noni,” said Renee. “I can do it.”
Noni nodded once as though something had been decided. She bent to each of us and hugged us, kissed us on our heads. There was a tickle of hair against my cheek, and then she disappeared down the long, dark hall to her bedroom.
Our mother did not emerge for three days. Then six. Then four. Then six again. This continued. Occasionally she would appear to cook dinner. Or ask us about our day. Or preside over a cut knee, a sunburned shoulder, a snotty nose. But primarily she rested in her room, door closed, curtains drawn, lights off. A bubble of darkened quiet that we feared to disrupt. How long did it last? Renee later claimed three years, give or take. Joe put it closer to two. When we were older, we called this period “the Pause,” but back then we had no words to describe it. We pretended that it was okay. This was temporary, we told ourselves. We must wait for Noni to finish resting. We must wait patiently for her to return.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_acff14f4-59dd-5d1f-8fd6-b02af016bab4)
THAT FIRST SUMMER we went feral. Joe and I became wild things, twigs in our hair, skin brown and dirty and scraped. Renee and Caroline tried to remain more respectable, more mature, but they, too, bore the marks of neglect and adventure. The house was never clean. We pulled what we needed from the cardboard boxes but did not unpack them fully. We played games, built forts, constructed castles that stayed up for days and then scattered underfoot as we played indoor tag or wrestled or fought. We slept in the clothes we wore all day, we did not brush our teeth, we bathed only when we began to smell ourselves or when Renee stripped off our clothes, pushed us under the shower, and turned on the tap. We ate food with our hands straight from the refrigerator or from the box of groceries that arrived every Friday, delivered by the stock boy, Jimmy, from the Bexley corner store. The food we received was odd or close to spoiling—leftovers, we came to see, unsellable. Charity. We were often hungry. We were always barefoot.
Joe and I explored our new neighborhood: only six miles from our old house, but it felt foreign. Another state, another country. There were people with brown skin, head scarves, tattoos. The houses were small, and domestic life spilled from windows and doors in ways that would have been unthinkable in our old neighborhood. In front yards men sat on beach chairs and drank from dull brown bottles. Women yelled at their children, who ran naked through a flicking sprinkler. A teenage girl blew smoke in practiced rings up toward the summer sky.
In twenty years Bexley would be deemed a commuter town and new expensive homes, new box stores, would arrive, but in 1981 it was small, forgotten, besieged by inflation and unemployment. On Bexley’s east side sat an abandoned mill where industrial furniture was once made for colleges and hospitals. Decades before, the company brought in workers from the city, settled them in cheap houses outfitted with the company’s own cheap wares. Now the mill stood empty, brooding, a sprawling, static octopus with graffitied tentacles of red brick and cracked windows and one tall, grimy smokestack for a head. All around the perimeter were scattered raw wooden boards, chairs with stuffing torn from seat cushions, tables with splintered stumps instead of legs.
Before the Pause, Noni often drove past the building, and always I would gaze at it with the fear and delight of a cowardly voyeur. During the Pause, Noni no longer drove, and so we had no occasion to pass the factory. But sometimes in bed at night, I imagined it: moonlight hitting the broken windowpanes, rats and cats and raccoons nosing through the interior, biting one another, fighting, scratching the furniture, defecating in empty rooms. I imagined a busy darkness, a dismantling that must be carried out under cover of night. The mysteries of the factory seemed to me similar to the mystery of Noni. Inside, invisible forces were at work, and they were full of a secret rage.
Our friends receded that summer. We couldn’t walk to the old neighborhood. Noni had instructed us to use the telephone only for emergencies. And besides, it soon became clear that our friends had returned to their normal lives, lives where groceries must be bought, dinners cooked, television shows watched, where loved ones were bothersome but healthy and alive. We reminded them of the constant threat of calamity. How quickly it could all go to pieces.
* * *
ON THE MORNING of my fifth birthday, Noni emerged to bake me a cake. We all watched as she lined up the ingredients on the kitchen counter: an ancient tin of baking powder, a wrapped square of hardened brown sugar. We did not volunteer to help. It seemed too risky. To us our mother was an exotic animal, a gazelle perhaps, that might startle if we moved too fast, spoke too loudly.
There was the soft drop of the sifted flour, the crack of the eggs, the steady buzz of the mixer, and then—ping—out of the oven came the cake, all golden and puffed up like my own private sun. We each ate a thick slab of cake, Noni, too, and then she kissed me and walked again down the hall, the thready hem of her bathrobe skimming the floor.
She closed the door to her bedroom.
I burst into tears.
Renee, Caroline, and Joe exchanged looks. Caroline hid a smile with her hand.
“Fiona,” Renee said, “Joe’s got a surprise.”
Out the front door Joe disappeared, and when he returned, in his arms was a small rabbit. It struggled with kicking surges to escape, but Joe held it close to his chest.
“Happy Birthday, Fi,” he said.
My heart surged with excitement as Joe brought the rabbit to me. Gently he placed it into my arms. I stroked its soft fur, its beating heart a rapid tapping against my palm. The fur was black and gray, except for white around the rabbit’s eyes and on its stomach. The rabbit looked very scared, but Joe talked in a slow voice and I used my softest hands, my gentlest touch.
“Where did she come from?” I asked.
Joe whispered, “A secret.”
Outside in the backyard, Joe helped me set up an enclosure of sorts with some broken-down boxes for a fence, a wooden crate propped on its side for shelter, and one cereal bowl for water, another for food. I named the rabbit Celeste after the elephant queen in the Babar books.
Every morning I fed my rabbit carrots and wilted lettuce and the small green apples that fell from the trees in the park. Celeste was not a delicate eater. Her nose moved together with her mouth in a grasping motion, and the food vanished quickly. I loved the quick motion of her eyes. I loved her long legs with their loping, circular movement like she was riding a bicycle. I loved her smell of musk and clean, fresh grass and even the dry, perfectly shaped pellets of dung that sat in tidy piles around her pen.
Joe loved Celeste, too. For weeks we studied her. We determined what she liked best to eat, where she most enjoyed a scratch, when she was most amenable to a cuddle, and when she preferred to play. Joe liked to feed her long blades of grass, the ends disappearing smoothly into her mouth as though she slurped spaghetti.
We doted on Celeste for one month, maybe two, and then she vanished. When I arrived one morning to feed her as I always did, her pen was empty. It was August, the days slow to start, humidity thick as fudge. Joe helped me search the bushes in the yard and took me down the street, calling “Celeste! Celeste!” until the dew burned off and we were both sweaty, pink-faced, still wearing our pajamas.
I wept as Joe carried me home.
“Fiona, listen,” Joe said. “Celeste had to go back to live with her rabbit brothers and sisters.” He set me down in the front yard. My tears had wet his pajama top. Stripes of snot glistened on his shoulder.
“Really?” I said. I hadn’t considered this possibility.
“Have you ever heard the term ‘reproduce like rabbits’?” said Joe. “All rabbits have so many brothers and sisters! The most of any species.” Joe was eight and wise in every single way.
I stopped crying. I believed my brother. All at once I felt ashamed for keeping Celeste imprisoned for so many weeks. I was glad that now she had returned home. It would be a terrible thing, I thought, to be separated from your siblings.
* * *
MY GRIEF FOR Celeste lasted exactly five days. Then Joe brought me to the pond.
It was another hot, sticky morning, and I lay on the couch reading War of the Worlds and imagining where I would hide from an alien invasion. I was a precocious and prolific reader, often stealing Renee’s books or ones from the cardboard boxes we had yet to unpack, generally preferring to exist within my own made-up world rather than the real one that surrounded me.
“Come here,” Joe said, standing in the doorway. “I want to show you something.”
I narrowed my eyes, examining his face, and then put the book down.
He led me along the sidewalk, through a neighbor’s backyard, over a low fence, and down a steep, wooded hill. The going was rough—no real path, heavy vegetation, and fallen tree trunks. Shifting spots of sun played with my eyes, and I tripped and fell. Joe helped me up, then swung me onto his shoulders, and I rode like this down the hill, ducking sharp branches, holding tight with my legs around his shoulders, my arms around his neck.
Finally the woods thinned, and Joe lifted me down. Before us was a shallow, sun-speckled brook that twisted through the trees.
“Ta-da!” Joe said, as though he were a magician and this his finest trick. It was cool here, calm, the water talking quietly to itself, the fizz of dragonflies and the airy whine of mosquitoes.
“Let’s stay,” I said.
For the next few hours, we played on the rocks beside the brook. We did not speak. We threw stones. We crouched and watched the spindly-legged water bugs skitter across the surface. We fashioned fishing poles from sticks and bits of long grass tied to the ends, but we had no bait and the quick, darting minnows ignored our efforts, instead flashing silver as they poked and picked algae from the rocks like housewives choosing melons. We walked downstream, the brook widening as it went. The sound of rushing water grew louder, and then the woods cleared and before us shimmered a small green pond set like a jewel amid the trees and the long cattails. On the far side was a dam with water rushing beyond it in turbulent free fall.
Duck grass and bunches of loosestrife grew along the perimeter, lily pads, too, with their hand-size leaves and stiff flowers like divination rods. There was a low grassy bank, perfect for sitting, and a small beach area of gray sand and pebbles. No one else was here, but I saw evidence of activity: a battered little rowboat overturned on the grass, a crushed soda can, a few orange cigarette butts, one marked with the dull red of lipstick. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.
“Joe!” I called. “Can we go in?”
Joe didn’t answer, just pulled off his shirt and jumped from the bank into the water. I stripped off my sundress and tiptoed across the sand. My feet, ankles, knees, thighs entered the water, and the cold advanced with an excruciating certainty that was lovely and painful all at once. Beyond the narrow strip of sand, the bottom of the pond was thick with mud and slime. I felt it squirt between my toes, my feet sinking deeper with each step. The cold clutched at my hips, my stomach, my bare chest, and it was only then I remembered that I could not swim.
My feet lost their grip on the slippery bottom. My head slid under smoothly, silently. My mind registered only surprise: at the cold, at the heavy silence, at the quality of the underwater light—green and glancing gold—and the fine algae that drifted like mossy snowflakes in the water. I waved my arms, and the algae spun crazily, an explosion of green particles unburdened by gravity. In the distance I made out the bulging eyes and long, spiked mustache of a catfish.
I wanted to stay here. It was beautiful and strange in a way that the gray house and our new life were not. That life was only strange, only coarse and dirty. Underwater in the pond was the first time I felt wonder.
And then Joe’s strong hand gripped my shoulder and he hauled me up out of the gold and out of the wonder. I inhaled, and the cold water invaded me. I thought I’d swallowed a minnow, a whole school of minnows, and their sharp silver bodies cut deeply into the interior spaces of my nose and chest.
“Fiona!” Joe cried. I coughed and sputtered as Joe pulled me onto the grass. I lay on the bank heaving and then vomited in one satisfying, emptying gasp.
The look on Joe’s face was terrible. “Fi, are you okay? I’m so sorry. This was so stupid. So stupid. Noni never taught you to swim, did she?” He hit his forehead with his hand.
“I’m okay.” My voice was a rough croak. I cleared it and repeated, “Joe, I’m okay.” It felt odd, me reassuring Joe who so often reassured me. The pain in my chest expanded at the sight of my brother in such distress. “Joe, you saved me,” I said.
Joe had already started to grow into himself. In one short season, he’d become a standout on his Little League team. His hands were huge, his feet huge, too, his shoulders skinny and boyish but broad, his waist narrow. He was shaped like a kite trailing streamers of pond water as he stood above me. He looked at me with his dark blue eyes and slicked-back hair, and his face transformed into a sort of relief.
“Save you?” he said. “I guess I did.” And Joe smiled.
* * *
THAT SUMMER JOE taught me how to swim. Every day we walked to the pond with towels and swimsuits and sandwiches. We started slowly, Joe’s hands on the small of my back, my arms circling, legs kicking up a flurry of water as I struggled to suspend myself. It took one week, and then I was floating on my back without assistance, my arms outstretched like the points of a star, hair spread around me.
“Next, dog-paddle,” Joe directed, and I knew that he was proud of me. I was not a quick study. I did not take easily to physical activity and was disposed to fall back on complaints of a sprained ankle, a shortness of breath.
One of the many miracles of the pond was that here, in the water, my physical self disappeared. The feeling was delicious. As I tilted my head back atop the surface of the water, a cold rushing filled my ears and I became weightless. This was a sensation I would remember some twenty years later, when I at last would lose the weight that since childhood had circled my body like a sleeping python. Unencumbered is the word I would use in poems to describe it. And also: Untethered. Unrestricted. Expansive. Free. I felt it first in the pond with Joe beside me in the water.
Renee soon turned suspicious. “Where are you guys going?” she asked one morning. She walked to Joe and sniffed his hair. “You smell fishy,” she said.
Renee and Caroline spent their days primarily indoors in front of the fan, where it was cool. They braided each other’s hair and made papier-mâché bowls and beads and masks by wrapping gluey strips of newspaper around the various items they wished to replicate. When they were tired of making things, they watched The Brady Bunch or The A-Team on rerun or sometimes a program that showed a man painting oil landscapes, his voice so calm that it stupefied them. They learned from this man nothing about painting, only that it was possible to spend your entire day in a sort of daze, half awake, half asleep, and at the end of it to feel jumpy and restless but entirely worn out from heat and boredom.
Renee sniffed Joe’s hair again. “Take us,” she said.
Joe and I led our sisters down the road, down the steep hill, along the bank of the brook through the woods until we reached the pond. The day was very hot, and the mere sight of the dark water cooled me off. The rushing sound operated as a hush on us all. Maples and slender birches arched over the pond. The current was weak and nearly invisible. Over the dam the water spilled like a silver cloth pulled through a wringer.
Renee let out a whistle. “Awesome,” she said.
Immediately I resented the presence of my sisters. This was our place, mine and Joe’s, and their intrusion altered the feel of it. Caroline wore a bikini and spread her towel in a sprinkling of sun. Renee began to patrol the bank in search of frogs. Yesterday I’d seen a large one, a bullfrog with a call like a rock dropping down a well, but I didn’t tell Renee. I let her search.
“Fi, let’s practice swimming,” said Joe. I scowled at him, but he lifted his eyebrows, and his face said, This is still our place. We can share with the others, it doesn’t change what we have found.
And so I relented. I let Joe place me into the water, stomach down. His hands buoyed me up, and I kicked my legs, circled my arms. I didn’t swim that day or the next, but it happened soon, that perfect moment when my body stopped being mere weight and became like the water itself: fluid, joyful, effortless. It was Joe who made this happen, Joe who clapped the loudest as I swam from bank to bank.
Over the course of that summer, Caroline and I developed a game. Inside the gray house, we rarely played together, but outside at the pond the rules shifted, expectations changed. She and I would scour the brook for water-rough pieces of broken glass or other strange treasures. The rocky bottom was full of odd detritus, perhaps castoffs from the old furniture mill or wayward bits from the town dump. Once we found a large silver spoon, then a crusty broken bicycle chain, then a small green bottle. We would arrange these treasures carefully and make up elaborate stories about their provenance and the lengths to which their previous owners would go to reclaim them. Before the Pause, Noni raised us on fairy tales and fantastic stories. Princesses and queens, mothers and trolls, a dashing prince, salvation, and a perfect everlasting love. The pond offered the perfect backdrop for magical possibility.
For weeks Caroline and I discussed the owner of the spoon, a wily queen from a distant, frozen place who became angry at her daughter and threw the spoon at the poor girl. The daughter ducked, and the spoon sailed over her defenseless head, across nations, oceans, time, and landed here in our brook.
“And then the daughter disappeared,” Caroline said solemnly. “The queen believes the girl’s spirit is hidden inside the spoon. She searches, but she can’t find it. The queen vows to search forever. Until her dying day.”
We gazed into the tarnished silver of the great spoon’s bowl and saw the barest dull reflection of our own faces staring back.
* * *
IT WAS THE second summer of the Pause when our game ended. This was when we first met Nathan Duffy. One morning we tramped down the hill and heard splashing, giggles, whoops. We emerged from the woods to see a gaggle of kids, each brown from the sun and shaggy-haired, different heights and genders but all variations on the same essential theme. Nathan was one of six siblings, looked after during the summers by their babysitter, Angela, who long ago had come to the pond when she was a kid. Now Angela spread out a flowered king sheet and sat smack in the middle with a crossword as the Duffy siblings swam, played, ate, and fought around her. Nathan was middle of the pack—two older brothers, three younger sisters—and the quietest. I hadn’t even noticed him until later that day when he appeared beside our blanket.
Nathan crouched on his haunches in the grass and asked Caroline about her book.
“Is that Nancy Drew?” he said. “Do you read the Hardy Boys, too? I like The Tower Treasure best.” It was overcast that day, a dull, heavy sky. Thunder was coming, rain too.
Caroline lifted her eyes from the book and studied Nathan. They were both long-legged and skinny, both dirty blond, both bronzed and squint-eyed in the sun. Nathan wore gold glasses that matched his hair. His gaze was careful and serious.
During the Pause, Caroline was the one who missed our parents the most. She cried easily, silently, at the kitchen table while we ate breakfast or later in the living room when we played Monopoly, even if she was winning. Her bad dreams raged for nights, then subsided, then took hold again without any apparent pattern or cause. She’d awake screaming and crying, and none of us could comfort her, not even Renee.
Now she coolly returned Nathan’s gaze and shrugged her shoulders. “Hardy Boys are okay,” she replied. “But Nancy is braver.”
Nathan tilted his head, considering. With his long, careful fingers, he picked at the edge of our quilt and at a collection of small, warm pebbles I had gathered and placed on a leaf.
“Wanna swim?” he said suddenly. He moved quick as a darting minnow, jumping away from us, running along the bank, from one side of the pond to the other, in and out of the water, atop the dam (although it was slippery and Angela yelled at him to come off), up a tree and down. At last he returned to Caroline. He shook his wet head at her, and she angrily slammed her book shut and stalked off to sit on the sand. But she looked back at him. I saw the glance, her interest in this pale, quick boy clear on her face.
It wasn’t long before we learned all about Nathan. He had a mother named Jeanette, a father named Cyrus, and five siblings who became known to us as a single unit: DouglasTerryMaddyEmilyJen. We called them the Goats, because their last name was Duffy, which reminded us of the Billy Goats Gruff from the fairy tale, and also because there was something goatlike about them, with their long, curious faces and all that shaggy hair. Each of them appeared strong-willed, utterly confident, fighting loudly with the others over questions of Eggo preparation and volcanic eruptions and Michael Jackson song lyrics.
The day after we first met Nathan Duffy, we met Ace McAllister. Ace came crashing down the path to the pond wearing head-to-toe camouflage and holding a BB gun.
“Bang, bang, bang!” he yelled, startling us from our games and books.
“That’s Ace,” Nathan declared without emotion as Ace pretended to shoot him again and again.
Ace was short and thick in the torso, with heavy limbs and broad features. He had an abundance of dark, shiny hair that fell into his eyes. He and Nathan were not friends, but they were neighbors and only one year apart in age, and so their mothers had thrust them together since their earliest days of playground visits and birthday parties.
“Angela, gotcha!” Ace yelled, and directed his attention toward the babysitter. Angela flapped a hand at him but did not lift her eyes from her magazine. Once she’d been his babysitter, too, and brought him on summer afternoons to the pond, but she’d quit to work for the Duffys. Now Ace’s parents left him alone with a ten-dollar bill, a house key, and instructions to keep out of trouble.
Within days it became clear that Ace was the wildest of us all. He cannonballed off the dam into the pond and whooped so loudly that even Nathan’s big brother Terry told him to quiet down. Nathan was in sixth grade, Ace in fifth at a private day school in Greenwich called Pierpont Academy. We all went to public school, and the idea of Pierpont—with its uniforms and lacrosse fields—struck me as impressively mature and intellectual, but Ace went there only because his parents had money and they didn’t know what else to do with him. He boasted that he’d been kicked out of a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire, suspended at public school, and Pierpont Academy was the only place that would take him. He talked of fights won, beers drunk, cigarettes smoked. We doubted the truth of these claims but listened nonetheless to the stories. He often brought his BB gun to the pond, or a loud boom box he claimed to have stolen. He captured frogs and crickets and once a small green garter snake, keeping each for a spell in a shoe box. I suspected he longed to poke these animals, or hurt them, but he didn’t dare with us there.
When Ace learned that Joe played baseball, he began to treat him with more interest and more aggression. He began to say things like, “Look, here comes Joe DiMaaaaggio,” drawing out the ah as a croak. But there was also the slightest hint of deference, of awe. Joe was one year younger than Ace but taller, stronger, with an athlete’s calm.
Joe regarded Ace cautiously. They were friendly, but, I believed at the time, they would never be friends. Ace was an unwanted but unavoidable summer accessory, and we accepted him as we accepted the humidity and the mosquitoes, with only mild complaint.
The six of us—me and Joe, Nathan and Ace, Caroline and Renee—formed a gang of sorts. We weren’t always together, not every day, but most days we swam at the pond or played Twenty Questions on the grass or watched TV at Nathan’s house while the Goats milled around and slammed doors and talked on the phone in loud, amused voices. In the early evening, once the sun began to drop, we would play baseball at the park. We always handicapped Joe—Only your left hand! No mitt! Close your eyes!—because otherwise the games were short and humiliating. We also wanted to see what Joe could do, and so we pushed him to perform in wilder, more ridiculous scenarios. He did so gamely, laughing, always succeeding at the trials we set. Sometimes we sat in the stands and watched as Ace pitched ball after ball and Joe hit each long and high, a dreamy, lazy smile on his face. An effortless look, as though hitting the ball like that required only the smallest piece of himself.
“Your brother will be famous,” Nathan said to me one afternoon in his careful, considered way. “He’s already like a superstar.”
I don’t remember replying. I might have said, Of course. I might have simply shrugged. It seemed so self-evident, there was no need for a reply. Joe was already a superstar. Back then did he know what people expected of him? At the field the look on his face was always dreamy, his movements casual, but it must have cost him to play like that. To give us the spectacle we craved.
* * *
IN THE LAST week of the summer of 1983, Joe and Ace fought. It was because of me, or rather what had been done to me. It was about, of all things, my rabbit, Celeste.
“You live in that gray house, right?” Ace asked me one afternoon. We’d been at the pond all day, and my skin was itchy and sticky from swimming and drying in the sun and swimming again. I felt slightly bored, definitely hungry, wondering what Renee would make us for dinner and whether the book I’d dropped accidentally into the water would dry in time for me to finish it tonight. I was six years old, chubby, pink-faced, and never without a book in hand. Recently I had started to keep lists of words in the black-and-white composition notebooks Renee used for school. They were not poems, not yet, merely catalogs of my feelings and sensations, things I had seen, events that had transpired.
Green, gold, fish, water, sun, grass, sisters, brother, swimming, free, warm, soft.
Ace looked at me now with intense interest. “The gray house?” he prodded.
I looked up from my notebook and nodded.
“Do you have a pet rabbit?”
I put down my pencil and closed the book. “She ran away,” I explained, “to be with her brothers and sisters.”
Ace began to laugh, great big peals. He held his stomach for effect and rolled over onto his back.
“Run away?” he said. “She didn’t run away. I took that rabbit.”
“But why?” I asked. I wasn’t angry yet, only confused.
“She was a mighty fine rabbit. Mighty. Fine.” Ace licked his lips with a slurping sound.
“Oh, stop it, Ace,” Nathan called. He was swimming, treading water as he listened. “Don’t tease Fiona.”
“I’m not teasing! I’m just telling the truth! ‘Don’t tease the girls, Ace. Don’t tell lies. Be a good boy like me.’” The last he said in a mocking, high voice. Nathan didn’t respond. He ducked his head beneath the water.
“You didn’t,” I said to Ace. “You did not.”
“I didn’t eat her, no. I’m just kidding. What I did was I took her over to the railroad tracks, down the other side of the hill, and played with her a little. I just left her there. On the tracks, I mean.”
Brown freckles marked the high point of Ace’s cheeks. They seemed to darken as he spoke.
“I tried to tie her to the track, put a rope around her leg,” he said. “I mean, so I could go back for her, bring her back to your house, but I think she must have gotten away. There was only a little bit of fur when I went to find her. Just a teeny scrap.”
My face grew hot, a pressure rose behind my eyes. I believed that Ace was lying, that he wanted to see me cry, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I couldn’t help myself. I remembered Celeste and her clean fur, her twitching triangular nose.
Soft, lovely, new, alone.
Joe saw me crying. “What did you do to her?” he called across the grass to Ace. Joe’s voice was sharp. He was playing solitaire, the cards spread in front of him, half a deck still in his hands.
I wanted to say, I’m fine, Joe, but the words wouldn’t come. The humid air moved thickly through my lungs. And then Ace answered for me. He repeated everything he’d told me about Celeste and the train tracks. Joe’s face went still as Ace spoke. I remembered how Joe had loved the rabbit, too.
“You’re lying,” he said to Ace.
“I’m not,” Ace answered. Now everyone was listening. Renee had stayed home that day to bake a pie from the raspberries that grew like weeds in the alley behind our house, but the rest of us were there: me, Caroline, Nathan, and two of the Goats. At the pond the lack of parental oversight made us wild in one way but conservative in another. We did not swear or fight with one another. We avoided conflict. Only Ace seemed intent on something more destructive. This would be true his entire life.
Ace was shorter than Joe, but heavier and thicker. He played no sports; he seemed to exist only on cans of Orange Crush and cellophane packages of Hostess doughnuts he would eat in three bites, powdered sugar ghosting his mouth.
“What are you going to do?” Ace said. “Huh, Joe? Big strong Joe?”
We watched Joe: he was very tan, which made his eyes more blue and his hair more gold than brown. All the swimming and hiking up and down the hill had melted away his baby fat. You could see in Joe now the beginning of his broad, muscular shoulders, the athlete’s chest and stomach that years later he would rub with baby oil as a lifeguard at the Bexley rec center’s pool, surrounded always by a cadre of high-school girls who looked like women.
But today he was still a boy. At his eyebrow one slender muscle twitched.
Joe did what I remembered instantly Noni doing from before the Pause, before our father’s death, when she was still our mother and engaged in the task of taking care of us. Joe counted down.
“If you don’t take it back in five seconds,” Joe said, “you’ll be sorry.” He swallowed and flicked his cowlick back from his eyes. “Five. Four. Three. Two—”
Before Joe could finish, Ace turned and ran. His legs carried him up away from the bank and around to the slippery top of the dam where the water rushed over concrete gummed with green algae. He pranced along the top. “Come and get me, Joe,” he said.
Joe didn’t go to the top of the dam. None of us did. Renee told us it was too dangerous, we could fall, and we believed her. We all watched Ace jump on one leg, then the other, taunting Joe, daring him. Ace’s feet were wrapped in silver as the water rushed over them.
“Come on, Joe,” he said. “You pussy.”
And then Ace slipped. One foot dropped over the far side of the dam. He landed heavily on a knee, which cracked with a sickening sound just before he slid off. For an instant Ace’s hands hung grasping onto the lip, water pushing into his face, but the force of it was too strong and the hands disappeared.
This happened so quickly that we barely registered his absence. Ace was there on the dam, and then he was gone. The still, hot air remained the same, the sound of rushing water, the buzz of a sapphire-blue dragonfly that started and stopped across the surface of the pond. It seemed possible that Ace would return, pop up again, that the thrust of those seconds would unfurl and bring us back to the start. But of course that can never happen.
Ace fell, and no one spoke, and then Joe ran up the path and into the woods surrounding the pond and down the hill on the other side. I heard the crash of underbrush, the thud of his feet. The drop on the other side of the dam was the distance of a three-story building to the ground. The pool into which the water fell was dark, rocky along the edges, and who knew how deep? The pool swiftly became a thin, roiling stream bordered by thick undergrowth and tall, shaggy trees. For us the pond marked the edge of our world. Beyond the pond, below the dam, stretched an unknown wilderness.
Joe called for Ace, his voice growing weaker as he traveled farther into the woods. Nathan began to follow Joe, and I stood, ready to join them, but Nathan told me harshly to sit down. “Joe and I can do it,” he said. “Girls stay here.” And then he, too, was gone, bounding into the brush.
Five hours after Ace fell from the dam, Joe stepped through the door of the gray house. He was sweaty, feet muddy, face and hands scratched from branches and brambles. Ace was fine, he told us, fished from the stream by Joe about half a mile from the pond. He’d swallowed some water, Joe said, and had been struggling when Joe found him.
“Was he drowned?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Joe said. “He puked up half the pond once I pulled him out.” Joe was smiling, but his face was tight and nervous.
Ace’s ankle had twisted in the fall, the knee was grazed raw and swollen, but he was able to walk with Joe and Nathan half carrying him back up to the road and to his house. Only Ace’s mother had been home, Joe reported, a woman none of us had ever met. She was tall and skinny, and she didn’t look like Ace one bit. She was sitting on a flowered couch and smoking a cigarette when they pushed open the front door. Ace’s house looked shiny on the inside, and Joe had been afraid to touch anything or even to place his feet on the pale carpet and so they’d hovered half in, half out of the door, holding Ace.
Ace’s mother blew smoke from her nostrils like a dragon before asking, “What happened this time?”
Joe and Nathan deposited Ace onto the couch and then waited as Ace’s mother poked and prodded at the ankle.
“Just a sprain,” she declared, and gave Ace a bag of frozen peas and the TV remote control. She pulled two crisp dollar bills from her wallet, handed one to Joe, one to Nathan, and said, “Thank you for bringing him home. Run along now.” So they did.
It was another week before we saw Ace again. One morning he returned to the pond with a slight limp, his left ankle wrapped in a putty-colored bandage, the laces of his left sneaker loose. He sat beside me on a towel.
“Mom says I can’t go swimming for another week,” Ace told me. He pulled a deck of cards from his pocket. “Rummy?” he asked.
Soon it became clear that Ace had changed. The challenge that he’d worn like a badge was gone. The bite of aggression between Ace and Joe evaporated. In its place was a new, cautious friendship. Joe treated Ace with kindness and some pity, almost as though he were a much younger child. Ace followed Joe, he courted him with a sort of stifled awe. Finally Ace understood, I thought, that Joe was special.
This continued for the rest of the summer, until we arrived back at our different schools, each of us locked in our own grade and class and routine. Sometimes during the winter, I’d catch a glimpse of Ace at the grocery store with his mother or gliding through town in the blue BMW his father drove, sleek and shiny as a slow-moving bullet. Always Ace looked small and shrunken beside his parents, who were both tall, graceful people. Later I understood how every day Ace disappointed his parents simply because of who he was: unambitious, easily distracted, petty-minded. Even then I recognized the signs of that disappointment: the way his mother did not look directly at her son. The way his father walked a pace in front. I found myself feeling sorry for Ace. I found myself unable to recall the Ace that once had seemed like a threat.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_bb87b53d-fd23-5071-b126-370a265128c1)
THE PAUSE COULD not go on forever. We knew this. There were dangers. We were children alone, the four of us, without protection or instruction, and while Renee played the part of quasi mother, she buckled under the weight. Unsustainable, I wrote later. Unsupportable, hazardous, perilous, unsafe.
The year that Renee turned thirteen, she grew high, round nubs on her chest and hair that went lank and greasy just days after her bath. She exuded a musty, earthy smell and was inhabited by a new atmosphere of churning activity like a spirit possessed. We had all seen the movie Poltergeist, and I thought that this was the only explanation for my sister: an otherworldly occupation.
One night Renee was late coming home. After cross-country practice, she always caught the late bus at five thirty, but it was now six fifty and dark, and still no sign of her. Joe and Caroline and I made ourselves cheese sandwiches for dinner and chewed silently on the couch, plates on our laps, watching the door. Twice Joe said he should call the school, but he hadn’t, not yet.
“What if she doesn’t come back?” Caroline said. She was ten years old and afraid of spiders, the kitchen garbage disposal, and the grrr sound Joe made only to frighten her. Nightmares still plagued Caroline and would well into her twenties.
I was undisturbed by Renee’s mysterious absence. Life without Renee was simply impossible. She made charts that listed our chores, homework, Joe’s baseball schedule, Caroline’s flute concerts, her own cross-country practices and meets. Renee ensured that we wore clean clothes to school, brushed our teeth, brushed our hair, caught the school bus, did our homework. Renee relit the pilot light on the furnace when it sputtered out. She forged Noni’s signature on checks and permission slips. She cooked spaghetti and frozen peas and pancakes from the Bisquick box. We had learned to exist without our mother, but we could not exist without Renee.
“Maybe,” Caroline said, “we should wake up Noni.” We hadn’t seen our mother today. We hadn’t seen her yesterday either.
“No,” said Joe. “I’ll go find Renee.” I saw in him the same air of responsibility, of taking charge, that he’d worn when Ace fell off the dam.
“I want to come,” I said.
Joe crouched down to look me in the eye. “Fiona, it’s better if I go alone. I’ll go faster. And you need to keep Caroline company. Keep her safe.”
I expected Caroline to dispute this, but she only nodded. “Yes, Fiona, stay with me. Please.” Caroline’s eyes were going red, her voice shook.
And so I stayed as Joe disappeared out the door, into the night. Caroline and I sat on the couch to wait. We did not talk or turn on the TV; we finished our sandwiches and listened intently for a sound, any sound, to come from Noni’s room.
Forty-five minutes passed, perhaps an hour, and at last the front door opened and Renee and Joe, both breathless and agitated, tumbled inside. Relief flooded me, a rush I had not known I was waiting for. Caroline burst into tears.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where were you?”
Renee pulled roughly at the curtains, clicked the lights off, and chased us all into the kitchen at the back of the house. Her manner was short and urgent. On her left cheek, there was a bloodied scrape, the skin swollen, and all at once, for the first time that night, I felt afraid.
“Sit down,” she ordered, and we sat at the kitchen table.
A car had been parked at the bus stop, Renee told us, a brown car with a man in the driver’s seat. An elbow out the window, sunglasses although it was dusk, the sun nearly gone.
“Baby,” he called to her. “I’ve seen you. Want a ride?”
It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop to our house. Renee did not want a ride, not from this man, and she told him so, but he began to follow her, the car inching along the road. No other cars passed, and Renee felt cold and very weak.
“I didn’t think I could run fast enough,” she said. Renee, who was a natural runner, whose thighs were the circumference of my arm, who galloped along the rocky cross-country trail in meet after meet, winning medal after medal, the child of a mountain goat and a gazelle. She had never before said there was a race she couldn’t win.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she continued. “I was afraid he would follow me here, so I went down another street and then another, and then he stopped the car behind me, and I ran and hid in the Hunters’ backyard. There was a swing set with a slide—like in the yellow house, remember? I hid under the slide until I heard Joe calling for me.”
Joe had wandered the neighborhood, walking in circles away from our house, he told us, calling Renee’s name.
“But what about your cheek?” I asked. “Who hurt you?”
Renee gingerly touched the spot on her face as though discovering it for the first time. “Oh. I … um …”
“She scraped it on the slide,” said Joe. “She ran out so quickly she didn’t duck low enough. So she hit it.”
Renee nodded tentatively, then with more force. “Yes, that’s it,” she murmured, again touching her face. “The slide.”
The man who called Renee “baby” never returned. It was an isolated incident, but it infected us in a way I didn’t understand until much later. Renee stopped taking the late bus and would now wait until her coach was finished for the night and could drive her home. Caroline’s nightmares doubled in frequency and ferocity. I stopped roaming the neighborhood as freely as I once had. Perhaps this was for the best—a check on our behavior, a lean toward safety—but I remember it only as a chill up my spine, a dampness to my palms. The idea that someone was watching us. That we were unsafe.
The incident made us all feel vulnerable, although in different ways. For Joe it was fear of what might happen to us, his sisters. But for us, Joe’s sisters, it was fear for ourselves. The man might come again for Renee or for me or for Caroline, but he would not come for Joe. Only girls remained at the mercy of men with bad intentions. Men in cars that were brown or red or gray, who wore sunglasses or didn’t, who were young or old, white or black, strangers or known to us.
This fear uncovered the tenuousness of our position during the Pause. The cracks became evident, and I watched them widen. Caroline and Joe began to fight frequently, Renee to cry without reason, to serve us dinner with shaking hands. Joe spent more time with his friends, girls in particular. He was the tallest boy in fifth grade, and girls took a spirited, wholesome interest in him as though he were a fuzzy stuffed animal in need of cuddling. Kim, Ashley, Shannon, Julie. I remember their ponytails and squeaky Keds and sticker collections in hard-backed photo albums with plastic pages. In school they would tease Joe gently and give him the Oreos and juice boxes from their lunches. They refilled his water bottle at baseball practice. They told their mothers that their friend Joe needed a ride to the movies, or a new pencil case, or construction paper for the science report about mammals, and could they please help? Joe accepted their attentions. He began to spend more time with these girls, away from the house and me.
In my notebook I wrote the words dust, dirty, drafty, alone, Gilligan, cold, island, tv, shipwrecked.
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER the man followed Renee, Joe took me to the old yellow house. It was only after the accident that I placed the two events together, not in the way of cause and effect but a more amorphous push-pull. A sense of growing unease. A secret interior turmoil finding its way into the open air.
The day we walked back to our old neighborhood was beautiful: sunshine and crisp air, clear sky, the rustle of flaming leaves underfoot. Autumn in full bloom. New people lived at the yellow house, a family with boys and girls, apparently. Joe and I stood for a spell on the sidewalk and surveyed the bikes, footballs, Frisbees and hula hoops that lay abandoned across the front lawn.
“There’s no car,” Joe said. He was holding my hand. “They must not be home.”
“But what about all this stuff?” I replied.
Joe shrugged. “Let’s go check.”
He led me around to the back door—down the side alley, past the garbage bins, turn left, cut across the lawn, over the patio, and there, the back door painted a bright white. I knew that door so well. It took my breath away to see it again.
“Maybe we could go in and look around,” Joe said.
“But, Joe …” I protested, though weakly. I wanted to go inside, too. I liked the idea of freely examining other people’s things, taking time to sort through the mother’s makeup bag, to check the Scrabble game for marked-up score sheets. Maybe I would find a journal, a notebook like the one I kept, filled with the secret thoughts of another girl. The possibility gave me a shiver of delight.
I followed Joe as he pushed open the back door and called “Hello! Hello!” We stood in the kitchen, our old kitchen, and listened to the quiet ticking of the clock, the silent settling of the house. The room looked the same, different only in small, frivolous ways. A new round table. Photos of unfamiliar faces pegged to the fridge. The smell was different, too, heavier than I remembered it, and more chemical.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Joe said.
Slowly we climbed the creaking steps. I went immediately to my bedroom but paused in the doorway. Unlike the kitchen, this room was fundamentally changed: bed, curtains, stuffed animals, all different, and, strangest of all, in a corner stood a bubbling fish tank that glowed blue. I saw no board games, no tantalizing notebooks. I stepped inside my old room and watched the fish dart in a mindless dance. They were the same size as the minnows from the pond, but these fish were brightly colored with stripes and spots, and they moved faster, with less purpose. There was nothing for these fish to do, nowhere for them to go. They were trapped.
“Fiona!” Joe called from the hall. “Fiona! Come here!”
I found him standing in what had been our parents’ bedroom. This room, too, was unrecognizable, with glossy furniture set in odd places and a large abstract painting on the wall.
“I thought he’d be here,” Joe said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Dad. We’re looking for Dad. That’s why we’re here.”
“Dad?” I barely remembered our father. I thought of him rarely and only with reference to Noni and all that she’d endured. “Joe, are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure,” he whispered fiercely. “Now, shhh. I know he’ll come.”
The yearning in Joe’s voice shattered the still air into a million pieces. It shocked me into a stunned silence.
And so we waited, standing in the middle of a room that no longer belonged to our parents. The air became heavier, the walls moved inward. I could hear Joe’s labored breathing and the faint tick-tick of a clock from another room. The moments lengthened and spun like a carnival ride. I chewed the inside of my cheek and waited for Joe to be finished. Everything about this made me light-headed, vaguely nauseous. Back then I didn’t believe that we would ever see our father again.
Without warning I began to giggle. The silence, the discomfort, the ache in my knees, the outright strangeness of it all. I couldn’t contain myself any longer.
“Joe—ooooh—” I held up my arms and wiggled my fingers. “Look, I’m a ghost Joe! Look!”
I moved toward him with arms outstretched. On my brother’s face, I saw an immediate deflation and a flicker of shame.
“Yeah, a ghost,” Joe said gruffly, and laughed. “Got you, didn’t I?”
The slam of a car door startled us both. There were voices outside in the driveway, then footsteps at the front door. Joe grabbed my hand, and together we ran down the stairs and out the back. We were breathless and scared, both of us laughing as we made it through the side gate and across our old neighbors’ lawns and eventually home to the gray house.
I never told anyone about this episode, although later I came to see it as a marker of the end of the Pause. Certain things had become unsustainable. Certain pressures threatened to explode. Renee’s responsibilities, Caroline’s nightmares, Joe and his … I didn’t know what to call it. His lack. The way he had everything and nothing. The way he smiled and flicked back his cowlick and said everything that everyone wanted to hear, and yet it seemed that his manner began outside himself, externally, with the wishes of others who wanted something from him. Coach Marty, Noni, the team, his friends, his teachers, the girls. Even us, his sisters.
What did Joe want for himself? I never knew. It was only years later, after the accident, that I realized I had never thought to ask.
* * *
AFTER THE EPISODE with Renee, it was ironic that a man in a car at last brought us salvation. The Pause ended because a man in a car slowed and stopped.
It was Renee, of course, who saw to it that Joe attended every baseball practice and every game. This was Joe’s fourth year of Little League. His progress in the sport was a rare orchid that we tended with careful watering, pruning, reverence. “Tell your mother Joe is doing great,” Coach Marty would say to Renee. “Tell her he’s one in a million.”
Twice weekly the four of us walked from home to the Bexley playing field. The route consisted of one mile of calm, tree-lined residential streets followed by one and a half miles of flat, fast Route 9, a four-lane highway running through empty fields of tall, yellowed grass and splintered old fences, the occasional neglected house, and one you-pump gas station. There was no sidewalk, so we walked in the breakdown lane or in the grass. Surely we looked curious to passing cars: Renee striding forward with her solid, sure-footed step; Joe pristine in his baseball gear, bat slung over a shoulder; me with curly hair crazy in the wind, skipping beside Joe to keep up; Caroline wearing a long skirt, singing to herself, lagging behind. The trip took over an hour.
One morning a car slowed beside us. A man leaned over to peer through the open passenger window. It was Coach Marty.
“What are you kids doing?” he asked. “Joe Skinner, is that you?”
“We’re on our way to practice,” Renee answered, still walking. “I’m taking Joe to the field.”
Coach Marty’s car inched along beside us as he considered this answer. He looked at me chewing a wad of bubble gum too big for my mouth, and then he pulled to the side of the road just ahead.
“I’ll take you,” he said. “Get in.”
Renee hesitated. Later we would come to know Marty Roach very well, but on that morning he was only Joe’s coach, the funny man with the dark mustache whom we glimpsed from afar on the field.
“We’re good at walking,” Renee said carefully. “We do it every week.”
It was a cold spring day, and the wind whistled along the road and the grassy fields and reached through our thin coats. We were all shivering, hands in pockets. Caroline’s long hair whipped around her face.
“Please, Renee,” said Caroline. “Let’s go with him.” There were dark half-moons beneath her eyes. Her tolerance for this life had reached its limits.
Renee looked at the road, she looked at Joe, who nodded, and then she said to Marty, “Okay.”
Marty’s car smelled of mint and tobacco, not cigarettes but the ripe, woody scent of pulp tobacco, and it seemed to me a cozy place, like a room with a fireplace in the days before Christmas. Years later I would date a much older man who smoked a pipe—pure affect, we didn’t date for long—but the first time he took the pipe out and lit it, I returned again to the back of that car. Coach Marty’s huge, meaty hands on the wheel, the back of his head a white dome striped with the dark brown of his comb-over. Gray vinyl seats, a pull-down armrest in the center that he pushed up to accommodate us, releasing a grainy silt that he wiped away with the back of his hand onto the floor of the car.
“There you go,” he said, and the four of us packed thigh to thigh into the back seat.
Some say there are no secrets in small towns, but I believe this to be false. There were people in Bexley who knew about Noni—I’m sure of it—but they kept the matter to themselves. Noni was a secret; Noni was something no one discussed. Back then there was no “reply all” or neighborhood message board. You had to pick up the phone and hope that the person to whom you wished to speak would answer. You had to walk out your front door and start up your car and drive to the Skinners’ new house and knock on the front door and hope that Antonia Skinner would not send you immediately away, as she did to Mrs. Lipton when she tried to drop off a tin of cookies that first Christmas.
The Skinner children went to school. We were fed. It was a difficult time—of course it was, everyone understood that. No one wanted to intrude. We were left alone.
Only Coach Marty did not leave us alone. Maybe it was the week after that first ride to the field, or the next month, or next season. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that one day Marty Roach came home with us.
That night there was a baseball game, a midseason corker between the Mavericks and the Eagles from neighboring Milford. Joe scored three runs, committed no errors, caught a high fly ball to close out the sixth inning, and you could see the hope drain from the faces of those Milford boys. The sun lingered in the sky after the game, bright pinks and orange, and in the air there was a buzzy warmth. My hands were sticky from melted ice cream. Joe’s purple-and-green uniform looked regal in the dying light, a worn-out king touched with glitter and dirt.
After the game Marty drove us home. I remember standing with him at our front door, which was painted the same dingy gray as the rest of the house. Our screen was torn, broken long ago during a game of pirates between me and Joe. The corner hung down, nearly touching the ground.
Renee used her key to let us in. She did not hesitate. She threw open the door as if to say, Here it is. Look and tell me, is this okay?
Coach Marty stood in the middle of the living room—a mess of unpacked boxes and dirty dishes, games, forts, discarded clothing, a trail of checkers I had laid days ago for a lost stuffed bear—and called for our mother.
“Mrs. Skinner? Mrs. Skinner? Antonia?”
No answer. And so Renee yelled, “Noni! Noni, come here!”
After a spell we heard a creak of floorboards. Noni emerged at the end of the hall in her bathrobe, which was dirty, her long hair wild around her head, and in that moment we saw her anew. Her face was indoor pale, her feet bare. I noticed the musty stench of the house, of unwashed floors and dirty dishes, damp towels, dusty corners. What before had been only Noni resting, always resting, now appeared to me terrible.
Our mother looked at Marty and said, “Oh. Hello.”
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER this, our Aunt Claudia arrived from Cleveland. She was childless, our father’s much-older sister whom we had met only once before at his funeral. She had tightly curled gray hair that sat like a bathing cap on her head and a long, horsey face. Claudia brought with her one pink suitcase and an air of rigorous competence. Our mother left the house; our mother returned; the house became clean; we became clean. Our mother left the house again, only this time she wore a neat blue skirt suit and lipstick colored a race-car red. Claudia told us that Noni was looking for a job, and about time, too.
“You’ve got to get on with things,” Claudia said as we watched Noni drive away. “Too much laying around isn’t good for anyone. Remember that. Keeping busy is the best defense against feeling sad. It’s simple, but it’s true.”
Aunt Claudia was proof of this lesson. She was the least sad and most busy person I had ever met. She swirled around our house with a cloth and a spray bottle like a bird looking for an exit, and everything she bumped into became clean, tidy, sparkling. Back home Aunt Claudia worked as a teller at a bank in North Royalton, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. She described for us the intricate details of her job, the piles of twenties wrapped in special paper, the safe as big as a room, the secret slots of the safe-deposit boxes where people placed the oddest things.
“Once a man came in and rented one for a pair of shoes, ladies’ shoes,” she told us. “Now, why would anyone do such a thing?”
For four weeks Claudia cooked large, well-balanced meals that we ate until our stomachs groaned; she cycled load after load of dirty clothes through the washer and dryer; she read aloud books we had read before, but still we listened; she bought us art supplies, and we colored diligently the pictures of forest animals and trees, though we were far too old for coloring books.
I wrote muscle, broom, thick, bristle, warm, squeak, soap, gravy, meat, full.
What we liked best of all was Claudia telling stories about our father when he was a boy: his extreme fear of ants, his favorite food (meatballs), the operation he had when he was ten to fix the knuckle of his right thumb (trigger thumb, she called it). When she recounted these episodes, her eyes would become glassy and she’d dab at them with a tissue she pulled from a small plastic pack that accompanied her everywhere.
One day we were eating lunch when Aunt Claudia said, “Joe, you look just like your father.” She paused to blow her nose into a tissue. “You’re the man of the family now. Don’t you forget it.”
We had never before considered the word man with reference to Joe. When Claudia said this, we all turned toward him. We were eating pink boiled hot dogs with white buns that disappeared like cotton candy in your mouth. Noni was out on another interview.
Suddenly Joe seemed altered. He felt it, too. He stiffened his shoulders, brought up his puffy chest. “I’m the man of the family,” he repeated, and I giggled because it struck me as both absurd and momentous. Joe was ten years old. A man.
Although we basked in Claudia’s attentions and listened avidly to her stories, inside we remained watchful. There was so much information, so much nutrition and stimulation that we barely spoke during the month that she stayed with us. We did everything she told us to do. We did not fight or talk back or make large messes because we were too exhausted by her capable, forceful presence. But secretly each of us wondered: what will happen when Aunt Claudia leaves?
On her last night, Aunt Claudia took us all to the International House of Pancakes. We were celebrating Noni’s new job as a receptionist at Dr. Hart’s dental practice across town. Dr. Hart, our father’s old competitor, had been looking for someone like our mother, someone who knew the ins and outs of the business, the peculiar dental vocabulary, the complexities of a dentist’s life.
Noni had cut her hair short with little wings on the sides like Billie Jean King, and it gave me a shock of strangeness to see her without a mass of dark curls. As she chewed her blueberry pancakes, her hand stole up to her neck to finger the sharp line where hair met skin.
“Thank you, Claudia, for taking such good care of us,” Noni said, and raised her glass of orange juice. We all clinked and called “Cheers!”
“Of course,” Claudia answered. “I only wish I’d come sooner. I just thought you needed some space, Antonia. That was really it.”
Noni only nodded.
“But I didn’t realize both your parents were dead. And no siblings. I hadn’t realized you were so alone, Antonia. Really, I hadn’t.”
“It’s okay. We’re fine now. Right, kids?” Noni looked around the table at each of us. Our fingers were sticky from maple syrup, our teeth and blood tingly with sugar. We had eaten stacks of pancakes, and yet our stomachs still felt empty. Were we fine? Yes. One by one we returned Noni’s gaze and nodded. Even Renee nodded. Yes, we said. We are all fine.
“Good,” Noni said. “Good.” She smiled a firm little smile.
And that was how it happened: we forgave our mother. We forgave Noni not because she was all we had, although this was true, but because we shared her. She belonged to the four of us, and for one not to forgive her meant that the others couldn’t either, and none of us was willing to shoulder the burden of that decision. None of us could bear to take Noni away from the others again.
* * *
AFTER AUNT CLAUDIA left, Noni returned with a vengeance. She began to call herself a feminist and to call us, her daughters, feminists, too. She bought books by Gloria Steinem and bell hooks and Germaine Greer that she read aloud at the dinner table. The year was 1984.
“Better late than never,” Noni said.
Only a few of my friends’ mothers worked. One was a professor at the University of Connecticut who wore half-glasses on a string of purple beads around her neck. Another, a family lawyer who rented an office in Bexley with her name printed in gold on the window. But for the most part, the mothers remained at home and oversaw play dates and drove us to the movies and lurked in the kitchen, where they banged pots and spread peanut butter onto saltine crackers for us to eat after school. While our father was alive, Noni had been this kind of mother. But after she began working for Dr. Hart, Noni changed. She would describe for us her day at Dr. Hart’s office, the patients and their troublesome dental quandaries, the new system of color-coded file notes, the car accident just in front of the building that closed the street for hours. We saw in these stories a Noni who enjoyed her life away from us. This life of drama and intrigue that existed far from the confines of the gray house and us, her children.
When I was in third grade, I memorized for the class Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Applicant,” which traumatized my poor teacher, Miss Adelaide. (“A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk!”) Fourth grade, I dressed as Gloria Steinem for Halloween and spent the entire night explaining the significance of my bell-bottoms and turtleneck. Fifth grade, Noni volunteered to assist in my puberty and health class, and I walked through the class handing out tampons and pads in purple plastic wrappers.
Noni regretted the Pause, she told us. She wanted to make it up to us, all those lost days while she rested. The missed baseball games and teacher conferences and Caroline’s flute concerts and Renee’s cross-country meets and dinners and bedtimes and love.
“I am so sorry,” she would say. “I am so, so sorry. I should have gotten some help. Thank goodness nothing horrible happened.”
We would look at one another and say nothing about the pond, or Ace’s accident, or the man who followed Renee from the bus stop. In fact, we told Noni nothing about the Pause. Wordlessly we agreed that it was better to keep these events secret. We saw this as protecting ourselves from discipline but also as protection for Noni. We believed that she required care and shelter, that we must not subject her to upheaval or stress. Our mother was a temperamental furnace, a rescue dog once hostile but then subdued.
Now Noni explained her own early life and marriage as a cautionary tale, the period of her paralyzing grief the price we all paid for her foolishness. In these stories our father emerged as a dashing but hapless prince, one who lulled the good princess into a life of fat complacency deep within a castle of tricks and mirrors. When the prince disappeared, the castle was revealed to be only a cardboard shell; there was no coach, no footmen, only the pumpkin and the simpering mice. The shock of it all sent the princess into a deep sleep, until a good fairy godmother—not another prince, please, anything but that—roused her. And what did the princess see when she first awoke? What greeted her and stirred her fully from the glass chamber? Why, it was the mice, of course. They clambered atop the wreckage of the castle and reminded her that she could build it herself again.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_01754c8f-eab0-5305-b094-9f8fa258670e)
THE YEAR WAS 1989. The first George Bush was president. The previous month on TV, we’d watched as young men and women with outdated haircuts and funny clothes took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall. There was a sense of radical change and diminished threats. It was June, a beautiful warm night, and we were eating dinner with the back door open. Light-hungry moths fluttered against the screen. The night air smelled of dew and pavement.
“I don’t want you girls making the same mistakes I did,” Noni was saying. “I loved your father, I did, but you must not rely on a man. You must have your own money. Your own direction in life.”
By now we were accustomed to this line of discussion. We all nodded. We were eating pork chops, steamed broccoli, underdone rice that stuck between our teeth. Tonight Joe had played baseball, and he still wore his uniform, which was dirty across the front from when he slid into home in the seventh inning. A nick of mud marked his chin.
When Noni discussed feminism, Joe remained cautiously curious, wide-eyed, mostly silent. He was afraid to ask the wrong questions, ones that would invite our mother’s disdain, and also he sensed—correctly—that these discussions were not for his benefit. They were intended for us, the girls. Noni believed that the world was harder on women than it was on men, particularly women without men, and you could become one of those in a heartbeat. Noni wanted us to be ready in the ways that she had not. Joe’s passage would be smooth, paved with the wishes of all those who loved and admired him and wanted only to see him succeed.
Renee and I listened avidly to our mother’s lectures, tonight and every night. We nodded and used words like patriarchy and privilege and gender. Shortly after the end of the Pause, Renee had announced that she would become a doctor, and now all her efforts pointed to this goal. AP chemistry, biology, and calculus; her part-time job at the lab in New Haven; her dominance on the Bexley High cross-country team.
Only Caroline, at sixteen, yawned or examined her fingernails or tried, occasionally, to dispute Noni’s lessons.
“But what if we want to be married?” Caroline asked tonight. “What if we want other people?” Caroline’s hair fell long across her back and was streaked a whitish blond from the Sun In she used every morning with the blow dryer. We knew that she was thinking of Nathan Duffy and the Goats, who now called Caroline an honorary Duffy. In the afternoons Nathan would ride his bike slowly past our house and leave on the front steps odd little gifts: one silver stick of dusty Juicy Fruit, a silky brown horse chestnut big as a child’s fist, a lone pink carnation frilly as a tutu.
Noni answered Caroline’s question in the abstract. Even if she knew that the front-door gifts were for Caroline, she believed them irrelevant.
“Fine. Have other people,” Noni said. “But remember that they can be gone—poof! In an instant. Gone. So be prepared.”
This answer did not satisfy Caroline, who shifted and fidgeted on her chair. She blinked rapidly, her entire face reddened. She looked ready to weep.
“Oh, Caroline,” Noni said, and her voice softened. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you, really, I don’t. I just want to prepare you. So you won’t have to suffer. So you’ll have an easier, better time than I did.” She took hold of Caroline’s hand. We had finished eating our pork chops; on each of our plates lay a ragged, moon-shaped bone.
I wanted to believe that Noni’s suffering would not be our own, but her lessons seemed difficult to place within the context of our actual lives. Noni herself had sworn off dating and all men. For her, easier and better meant being alone. We watched The Love Boat every Saturday night with a mixture of delight and unease as the new cadre of attractive passengers flirted and kissed and paired off in the few short days of their tropical cruise. Was this supposed to happen? Caroline seemed to me the purest example of true love: worshipped by Nathan in a factual, fateful way. But even their relationship was dependent on parental whims and the absence of snow, which in the winters made the roof too precarious for Caroline to shimmy across and down to Nathan’s waiting car.
Caroline, still sniffling, turned to Noni. “Can I ask you a question?” she said gently.
“Of course,” Noni answered.
“I was wondering if I could have a slightly later curfew. Just on Saturdays. Or Fridays. One day.” Caroline’s eyes glistened, still wet from her tears. “Please,” she said.
I almost considered Nathan to be one of us, the Skinners. He loved the secret, rushing green of the pond; he knew about the Pause. I’d watched him grow just as I’d watched Joe, with his sudden height and the rough spots of beard that appeared in patches across his cheeks and neck like camouflage. But Noni knew nothing about that. To her, Nathan presented the same risks and liabilities as a stray dog brought home from the park. Would it bite? How long would it stay? She looked at him askance no matter how strenuously he tried to impress her.
“I’m going to study biology,” he had told Noni earlier that year, “be a university professor. I’m particularly interested in amphibians, frogs mostly. They’re disappearing. We need to save the frogs.”
It was the pond that had started this for Nathan. The baritone bullfrogs and the smaller ones, green as a new leaf. The plunk-splash sound as they leaped into the water. The bulging, lidless eyes, jellied, glistening.
But Noni had no use for frogs, or for Nathan. She had imposed a strict 11:00 P.M. curfew on Caroline, Renee, and me, although it was clear that only Caroline truly needed it. I was in sixth grade, twelve years old, and had nowhere to go, nothing outrageous to do. My most scandalous behavior involved sneaking into movies I hadn’t paid for at the cineplex with my friend Violet and eating far too much buttered popcorn.
At night Renee studied organic chemistry and compared medical schools. After one brief romantic fiasco last year involving our high school’s star wrestler, Brett Swenson, Renee now ignored boys altogether. She was too busy, she said, for distractions. She accepted Noni’s curfew with a shrug.
On this spring night, all of us together at the dinner table, Noni tilted her head and narrowed her eyes as she considered Caroline’s request for a later curfew.
“No,” she said. “We’ve been over this, Caroline. You have a curfew for a reason. I want you home.”
“But what about Joe?” Caroline asked.
It was true that Joe glided through the gauntlet of Noni’s discipline unmarked. Noni let him go to parties, date widely, deeply. And—this was the kicker for Caroline—stay out as late as he wanted. By the time Joe reached Bexley High School, he was a six-foot-four center fielder with the reach and charm of Willie Mays, the goofy grin and sleepy eyes of Joe DiMaggio. Girls swooned over him, boys followed him down the hallways and invited him to parties. Teachers indulged him whether they realized it or not. His dimples, the soft swell of his walk, the subtle crack in his voice, the tall golden promise of Joe Skinner. Parents congratulated Noni routinely, because they understood that just to have a son like Joe—simply to be the origin of whatever DNA soup produced a boy like that—was something to celebrate.
Noni said that Joe didn’t need a curfew. He was always up early for baseball practice anyhow. He hated alcohol. Hated the taste, hated the way it made him feel: out of control, bumbling, fuzzy. And think about the public service he performed as the reliable designated driver, the lone sober man among a battalion of high-school drunks. Why would Noni put others at risk just to make a point?
“But Joe is younger than me!” Caroline exclaimed.
Noni sighed. “Listen, if Joe needs one more hour to keep some other kid from driving home drunk and killing himself—Caroline, I’m going to let him do it.”
The rest of us remained silent. This scenario had played out before, always with the same result. Now, predictable as Christmas, Caroline would push away from the table, pound down the hall, and close her door with a wall-shaking slam.
But this time she didn’t.
“You play favorites,” Caroline accused. “You let Joe do whatever he wants, and you take it out on us.”
I inhaled sharply. Renee was looking down at the table. Joe’s eyes were closed, as though he could remove himself from this fight by refusing to acknowledge its escalation.
“That’s not true,” Noni said.
“Yes it is.” Caroline’s cheeks deepened to red. There was a recklessness in her voice. “And we have to go to every single baseball game. And you don’t care about his grades. And he gets to stay out late, and he’s sleeping with girls. Older girls. Did you know that? Jeanine Bobkin, Christi from Hamden High. That exchange student from Italy. And he’s only fifteen!”
“A lot more can happen to you, Caroline Skinner, when you stay out late.” Noni said this quietly, and it was the softness of her voice that made us all listen harder.
Caroline pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, her eyes blazing. Until this moment I had always seen Caroline as a mild person, someone who squealed rather than yelled, who labored over friendship bracelets pinned to her knee. But here she was, animated by her sense of injustice, training the full force of her fury onto Noni, whom we generally shielded from any conflict or emotional excess. Now, nearly six years after the Pause had ended, such precautions were perhaps unnecessary, but they had become routine.
“I … I …” Caroline stammered. Her resolve, so firmly stamped on her face, was not finding its way to her mouth. We watched our sister struggle for the right words. “I … I … I hate you,” Caroline said to Noni, and then she burst into tears and ran to her room.
A dangerous, damaged silence descended. I glanced sideways at Noni, trying to gauge her mood. But Noni merely sipped her wine, chewed her chop. Our mother was opaque to us, a combination of stubborn principles, disciplined instruction, and distance. It was Caroline who wore her heart on her sleeve. Our mother taught us how to protect ourselves from hurt but not how to determine what might be worth the risk.
Joe was the first to speak. He opened his eyes and said, “Should I apologize? This feels like my fault.”
“No, you should not apologize,” Noni replied in her no-nonsense way. “Just give her some time.” She sipped the last of her wine, then brought her plate to the kitchen and followed Caroline to her room. I could hear her knocking on the door and her patient voice. “Caroline, please let me in. Caro?”
Renee began to clear the table. I helped until the plates were stacked in the dishwasher, the wood wiped clean, Renee in her chair, pulling an acid yellow highlighter thick as a cigar across a page of her calculus book. The smell of meat and steam still lingered in the room. The front door was closed now, the house shut up tight, battened against the buggy spring night. Noni had gained entrance to Caroline’s room at last. I heard an occasional muffled sob, a brief angry shout.
Joe had finished his homework on the bus, he claimed, and stood in the hall, ear pressed to phone. I was on my way to the kitchen to find something more to eat. My chronic hunger was a residue from the Pause. It didn’t matter how much I ate during the day; always at night I’d feel an empty rumbling. As I passed Joe in the hall, he held his hand over the mouthpiece. “Battleship?” he asked me.
I heard a flash of feminine mumble, a giggling laugh.
Fragrant, flounce, hair, tease, pretty, smile, wink, sugar, sweet.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
I set up the game there on the floor of the hall, and we played, sitting cross-legged, facing each other. I ate a salami sandwich. Joe drank two glasses of milk and remained on the phone. He gave the conversation only the barest attention. D9. F10. A13. With each coordinate he placed his hand on the mouthpiece.
“You sank my battleship,” he told me.
“Yee-haw!” I whooped loudly.
Joe frowned and told the girl he needed to go. Feminine protest erupted on the other end. I could hear the tone but not the words: pout, cajoling, Joooooe. I widened my eyes and twirled an index finger at my forehead. Cuckoo, I signaled to Joe. You and all these stupid girls. I vowed then never to be like them, frivolous and weak-willed, with their glossy lips and padded bras, speaking for hours to a boy who only pretended to listen.
Joe kept my gaze. “Holly—” he said into the phone, but she kept interrupting him.
“I’m—”
“Listen—”
“Wait—”
And then he simply hung up.
“Your turn,” I said.
As we continued the game, Joe jiggled a knee, tapped an index finger against the floor, squinted and frowned. Back then some part of Joe was always in motion. A leg, a finger, a crack of the neck, a roll of the shoulders. He was still growing, his bones lengthening, skin expanding, his whole person surging forward into a bright unknown. Joe’s vitality seeped out of him, uncontainable. I felt it all the time.
“Fiona,” he said as we were clearing away the pieces of the game. He had won, but barely.
“What?”
“I’m glad you’re my little sister.”
I shrugged. “It’s not like I have a choice,” I replied, but I felt my big, hot heart spreading through my chest like a starfish, like a many-fingered creature that had finally found its treasure. “Noni wouldn’t let you trade me in anyhow.”
“True,” Joe said, and he grinned back at me, a faint milk mustache still clinging to the delicate blond hairs of his upper lip. He looked beautiful and sated and spent.
* * *
AND THEN, IN a heartbeat, with a rattle of Caroline’s armful of bracelets, the squeak of Renee’s running shoes, the funny hiccup of Joe’s laugh, my siblings were leaving home.
—cold, lonesome, lone, together, mother, brother, sister, other—
Picture the day: late summer in New England, humid and close, the lawn thick as shag from Noni’s tending. A day when we would have been at the pond. The year was 1992, and eighteen-year-old Joe was piling suitcases and plastic crates, a secondhand microwave, four pillows, three baseball bats, a life-size cardboard cutout of Bill and Ted into Noni’s Volvo station wagon.
“Do you really need the cardboard thing?” Noni asked, squinting into the sun. Dog-day cicadas whined with a high-pitched keen, a cyclical sound so pervasive you didn’t even notice it until it was all you noticed, and then, at that very moment, the sound began to fade.
“Yes,” Joe said solemnly. He was sweaty, wearing blue nylon shorts and a purple-and-green Mavericks tee. “I need them. I’m pretty sure it was on that list they sent. Books, sheets, Bill and Ted …”
“Okay, okay,” said Noni. “Bring Bill and Ted. But don’t blame me if your new roommate asks to switch.” She winked at Joe and slid the poster into the back of the car.
All morning Noni had pranced around like a golden retriever. Alden College! Our mother had won the parental college lottery: not Ivy League but close, with a full financial-aid package. Given Joe’s mediocre grades, no one thought he had a shot at a school like Alden, but Coach Marty knew the baseball coach. Alden needed a freshman center fielder, and Joe Skinner was it.
“Joe, don’t take Bill!” I called from my seat on the front lawn. “I love him!” For the first hour of packing, I had helped, sort of, but the tolerable morning temperature had given way so quickly to a sludgy, heavy heat that I’d declared myself overwhelmed and found a place in the shade. “Just cut Ted off,” I called. “Take Ted, but leave Bill.”
My childhood baby fat had not melted away as we all (or at least I) had assumed it would. That summer I was fifteen years old, alarmingly pudgy from puberty and Coke and frosted doughnuts and a general aversion to physical effort. For three long months, I’d moped around the house, reading too much sexed-up Updike and working a stinky, mindless job at a burger place in Bexley that paid me eight dollars an hour to cut tomatoes and onions and lift buns off the grill before they burned. I felt a persistent exhaustion brought on by the act of pushing my body through the days. My knees ached, my back ached, my fingers stank, my friends all annoyed me. I had no desire to grow older; I was already old enough.
I had started work on a dandelion chain when Nathan Duffy’s dented old VW pulled up to the house. The passenger door opened with a rattle, and out tumbled Caroline in a short flowery dress, her waist-length dirty-blond hair falling like a cape behind her.
“I’m so glad you guys haven’t left!” Caroline called to Joe. “I thought we’d missed saying good-bye.” She scanned the lawn. “Where’s Renee?”
I pointed: Renee was sitting on the bumper of the rented UHaul, the U-Haul she’d packed up the night before with everything she’d need for her first year of medical school at Boston University. A fine sheen of sweat covered her tan limbs, legs in micro running shorts. Her arms were crossed against her stomach, her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that bobbed slightly as she tapped her foot. Renee, impatience personified.
“We’re still an hour away from leaving,” Renee told Caroline. She checked her watch, then looked pointedly at Joe. “At least.”
Joe grinned back. Look after your brother, Noni had said when it became clear they would both be going to school in Boston. And Renee had answered, Have I ever not?
Nathan ambled around to sit next to me on the grass. “Morning, Fiona,” he said.
“Renee, should we bring the snow boots now or wait till after Thanksgiving break?” Joe called across the lawn.
“Bring them,” Renee answered, examining a cuticle. “It might snow before we get back home.”
Back home. They were leaving, all of them. In one two-week stretch, I was losing Joe to college, Renee to medical school, and Caroline to Lexington, Kentucky. That spring Nathan had graduated early from University of Connecticut and was set to start a biology Ph.D. program. Caroline would transfer schools. Although there was still some question about her credits, there was no question that she was going with Nathan.
Noni and I would remain alone in the gray house.
“I’ll miss you, Fi,” Joe said. Sighing, he lay down beside me on the lawn and shaded his eyes with his hand. “A lot.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“You’ll be happy we’re gone. Really, you will. No more noise. No more of that awful Indigo Girls.” The last he said loudly in Renee’s direction, but she ignored him apart from a quick flip of her middle finger.
“Or farting,” said Caroline, staring pointedly at Joe. She lay down and settled her head on Nathan’s thigh. “The house will be a lot less stinky.”
“Um, Caroline,” said Joe, “perhaps you haven’t noticed, but our mother can pass gas like a champ. Right, Noni?”
“What? Joe?” Noni was coming out the front door carrying another box. “Joe, why are you lying down? Why is everyone on the grass? Aren’t we still packing?”
“I’m taking a break,” said Joe. “Fiona looked sad.”
“I am not sad,” I said quickly. It was a lie, of course, but I objected to the idea that I was so easy to read. The truth was that I didn’t want this, us here sprawled on the lawn, to end. I wanted this miserable, hot day to go on forever. I wanted Joe beside me, Caroline and Renee within earshot. All of us close enough to touch.
“Noni,” said Joe from his prone position, “I just want you to know that I plan to be home a lot, so don’t forget the Dr Pepper and the sour-cream-and-onion Lay’s potato chips, not that Pringles bullshit, and those peanut butter M&M’s and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream—any brand is okay, but it must be green.”
Noni stood above Joe, hands on her hips.
“Are you taking notes?” he asked. “Mental notes?”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. Now, would you get up and help me finish here?”
“Fiona needs me more,” Joe said, but he pushed himself up just enough to throw his arms around me and kiss me on the cheek, and then he was up, running back into the house.
“Yuck.” I rubbed Joe’s spit off my face. Nathan smiled, but there was tension and distraction in his face.
“Caro,” Nathan whispered to Caroline. Her eyes were closed. “Now?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered without opening her eyes.
“Now what?” I said. I’d heard a tremor in Nathan’s voice, an unmistakable wobble of excitement.
“I think we should get your mom,” Nathan said. Caroline’s eyes fluttered open.
Soon all of us stood in a loose circle in the shade thrown by the towering locust I had never been able to climb, all of us looking at Caroline and Nathan.
“Caroline, what is it?” asked Noni.
Nathan looked to Caroline, who smiled and nodded. Nathan cleared his throat, but it was Caroline who spoke. “We’re married!” she said, and clapped her hands quickly like a child.
The words dropped quiet as a cloud into our circle, and for a moment we all stood muzzled, stunned. A crow called across the empty street. Somewhere, a lawn mower started up with a bewildered buzz. Caroline was nineteen years old.
“Oh, Caroline,” Noni said, her voice thick, her face fallen.
“We did it last week, at the courthouse,” Caroline said, ignoring Noni. “Here’s the ring.” She held out her hand, and yes, there it was, a thin silver band with a stone so small it seemed merely a nick in the metal.
“And I thought I would be the last,” Noni said.
“The last what?” asked Caroline.
“The last to … to decide something like this. For a man.”
Caroline said nothing. Nathan shifted, his discomfort clear. We all waited as our mother considered the news of Caroline’s marriage. She shook her head and looked up at the sky, which was flat and heavy and absolutely blue. I thought she might yell or begin to cry, and for a moment all four of us stood poised to receive that, ready in that far-off, distant way we would always be ready to lose our mother again to turbulent, unbearable emotion.
Noni exhaled. She shook her head and grimaced and wiped her eyes. “Well, at least you’re not pregnant,” she said with a laugh. And then, anxiously: “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
Caroline giggled and shook her head no. “Well, congratulations, then,” Noni said. “This is … exciting!” And with that we all breathed once again.
“Congratulations!” I said. “What a surprise!” I hugged Caroline and stepped back to examine her. She didn’t look any different. I almost expected the weight of this event to show on her face, alter the light in her eyes. But no, the same limpid blue, the same pale smattering of freckles. Only Nathan seemed physically altered: he stood straighter, it seemed to me, shoulders more square. The responsibility perhaps weighed on him, or maybe it simply made him proud. Husband. Wife. Despite our mother’s lessons, or maybe because of them, I believed secretly and fervently in the heady promises of love. I believed it would mark us all in some irreversible, wonderful way. Even me someday.
And then, before I knew it, Renee and Joe were in the car, the sun falling in long lines through the low branches, Noni calling out last-minute driving directions, and Renee nodding and yelling out the window, “Don’t worry!”
“We’ll see you next week!” Noni called. In a few days, when Noni could take time off work, she and I would drive to Boston for the end of Joe’s orientation week. Then I would see his drafty dorm room, Alden’s emerald quad and sparkling baseball field, and meet a few of the boys who would become his teammates and fraternity brothers, his best friends. They all seemed cut from a mold: strong-boned, clear-eyed, with shockingly good posture. Joe looked like them. He fit in, I thought then; he had found his natural place. We would meet Joe’s coach—a tall blond man with dazzling teeth who spoke very fast and made me long for Coach Marty—and eat tepid pasta in the cavernous freshman dining hall. Throughout, Joe would usher us from one event to the next, building to building, with a sort of good-natured bafflement, as though he were as surprised as anyone to find himself here, amid the ivy-covered walls and straight-A students.
As Renee carefully released the parking brake and eased away from the house, I saw Joe freeze: a thin smile, a hand in mid-wave, a length of tan, strong arm.
“Good luck!” I called. This seemed the right thing to say, although I considered Joe already the luckiest, the most charmed. It seemed inevitable that all he wanted would line up before him like the balls that long ago Ace would pitch, pulling them one by one from his bulging pockets as we watched breathless from the stands.
Crack, crack, crack, crack!
Each hit was followed by a startling, whole silence as we watched the ball travel up into air and then breathlessly down, down, down, until it would land with a final dull thump in the grassy field.
PART II (#ulink_58ed6b7a-d35d-527f-9806-92c4c76e38b2)
Year 2079 (#ulink_8f5d4399-b12d-5714-bb0e-0fafd0d6f872)
THE LIGHTS IN the auditorium flickered once, then again. The microphone cut out and I stopped speaking. Henry, dear Henry, stood up from the front row and made his way onstage. He was only eighty-four, but his knees were bad from riding horses all those years, and so he limped a bit, winced as he climbed the steps. There was an empty chair beside me, vacated hastily by the venue organizer, and Henry took it and then took hold of my hand and brought it to his lips. In the second row, a young man and woman watched us. She had vivid red hair, the color of a flag, and the man’s arm circled her shoulders. Her hair fell across his chest. They, too, were holding hands. Entwined, I thought. Knotted, woven, linked.
And that was the moment the room plunged into darkness. I felt the pressure of Henry’s palm. There was one short, sharp scream from the balcony, but otherwise the crowd remained calm. No rush for the exits, no hysteria. This kind of thing happened too frequently now for it to rouse much of a panic. Still, I felt the heightened tension in the room. The shallow breathing, hands squeezing hands, sweat rising on palms, eyes staring into nothing. Whispers of confusion and comfort.
We waited in darkness for one minute, three, five. My thoughts turned to Luna, the young Luna here in the room and the other Luna out there somewhere. Was that Luna still alive? Did she ever wonder about me, too? Did she wear a diamond ring on her finger? On a chain around her neck? Or was it hidden away in a drawer, unworn and forgotten?
My eyes adjusted. A few exit signs glowed orange. The greenish hue of screens flickered like fireflies on a summer night. I remembered the security check: DEVICES STRICTLY FORBIDDEN INSIDE THE AUDITORIUM! But of course there are always people who will find a way to break the rules.
“The whole city is out!” one woman declared, reading from a bright light.
This information provoked more agitation, groans, and some hurried, hushed conversations. Who cares if the city is out? I thought. Perhaps it was one of those megastorms, or a tremor deep underground, or a hurricane off the coast of Borneo. The news exhausted me. The news bored me. What did it matter? Here we sat, the proverbial ducks. We might as well just reach for the chocolate candy in our pockets, hold the hand of the one we love best, and smile.
Backstage I heard the rustle and hurried footfalls of venue staff doing their best to turn the lights on again.
“We’ve got it,” a voice called, “the generator.” There was the thump of a heavy lever being pulled and dim yellow lights emerged along the base of the walls and along the rows between seats.
Suddenly the space was transformed. It was no longer dark and menacing, nor was it a grand auditorium divided between stage and audience. It was now simply a room, a large, cozy room with an arched ceiling and many, many chairs. Oh, this is something, I thought. Now we can have a proper chat. Now we can get down to the things that matter.
The young woman Luna had been perched on a folding chair. Now she again stood. She tapped the microphone gently, but it was dead, of course, and so she called out, “Ms. Skinner?”
I felt a surge of great affection for her, irrational in its intensity. That mole, high on her right cheek. I struggled to recall the other Luna, the Luna from a lifetime ago.
“Yes, dear,” I said. “Please go ahead.” I wanted to scoop her up and protect her, to ferry her out of here and back to my house in the woods with its fence and bunker and generator and fresh-spring well. There I might convince myself that we were safe.
“When did the unraveling begin?” Luna asked.
“The unraveling?” I repeated.
“You said this was a story about the failures of love,” said Luna, her tone accusatory. “That’s what you said.”
“Yes. I did say that.”
“You repeat the word unraveling several times in The Love Poem. You said there was happiness in your family, and then—” Luna did not finish the sentence. She left the question hanging over me, over us all.
“And then,” I repeated. I cleared my throat. I glanced at Henry, and he winked, nodded for me to continue. If there is one thing I have succeeded at in life, I thought then, it’s choosing husbands.
When did Joe’s unraveling begin? I considered how to answer Luna’s question. When he met Sandrine? Or took the job at Morgan Capital? Or was it when his baseball career ended with one slide into home? Maybe it began even earlier, when he was still a child who looked like a man, tall and golden, watched and worshipped in Bexley like the local god of any small village. Later, when I asked my sisters, Caroline believed that it began during the Pause, when the ways in which love might disappear first became known to us. We were too young, Caroline said, for that kind of wisdom.
Renee said no, the Pause didn’t do that to Joe. Look at the day of our father’s funeral when he raged and howled. Renee believed that the unraveling began then, in the yellow house, Joe with the fireplace poker, surrounded by all those who loved him and no one, not one of us, able to help. From that moment, she believed, it was written across his skin, embedded within the veins.
To unravel is to unknit, disconnect, untangle, separate. To fall apart.
“I will tell you this,” I replied. “The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.” I was speaking directly to Luna now, not to the woman with the red hair and her partner, not to Henry, not to the faceless masses here in the hall who had paid money to see me speak. Only to Luna. “The unraveling began—” I said, but then stopped myself, tilted my head. “I don’t know when it began, I’m afraid. But I do remember when I first became aware that it was happening.”
Chapter 5 (#ulink_7e1f9060-1490-51c6-a872-a0789c312f77)
IT WAS AUTUMN 2004. An election year, long enough after 9/11 that we no longer spoke of it every day but close enough that the Manhattan skyline still looked broken. I had agreed to help Caroline clean out her new rental house in the small town of Hamden, Connecticut. I’d seen Caroline and her family infrequently since she and Nathan had left Bexley. In twelve years they’d moved four times, from one university town to the next in search of Nathan’s Ph.D. in biology and a permanent teaching position. The Skinner-Duffys now numbered five: Nathan, Caroline, ten-year-old Louis, and the twins, six-year-old Lily and Beatrix. Their most recent moves had been to cities where one of Nathan’s siblings lived—his brother Terry in Columbus, his sister Maddy in Austin. We’d assumed they’d settle there in Texas, the kids growing up with drawls and a fondness for BBQ, but last month Nathan had received a tenure-track offer from Hamden College, a cozy liberal-arts school located thirty minutes from Noni in Bexley and an hour’s train ride from me, Renee, and Joe in New York City.
Caroline was finally coming home.
“I’m happy to help with the move,” I told Caroline. “Whatever you need me to do.”
“Oh, Fi, thank you,” said Caroline. We were on the phone, Caroline in Austin, me in my apartment in Queens that I shared with Jenji and Beth, two friends from Vassar and a third, Umani, we’d found on Craigslist. I was twenty-seven years old and worked as an editorial assistant at an environmental NGO called ClimateSenseNow! My job sounded good at dinner parties, but it required little more than correcting the maddening typos of my boss, Homer Goshen, Ph.D., and writing the occasional high-minded press release. Because of this, and because I was paid less per hour than an adolescent babysitter, I felt justified in taking regular sick days. Inexplicably, Homer allowed it. Hope that ankle heals up, he’d say over the phone, or That must be a nasty bug. A guilty pang always followed these calls, but rarely was it strong enough to make me go to work.
“The Goats are useless,” Caroline continued. “No one can come, even for a few hours. They’re all so busy getting married or finishing their dissertations or whatever. Emily showed at New York Fashion Week, did Noni tell you?”
Emily was Nathan’s second sister, a recent graduate of FIT, prone to wearing foodstuff as clothing.
“She hasn’t mentioned it,” I said, although of course Noni had. “It’s hard to keep up with the achievements of those Duffys.” In the background I heard one of the twins singing a nonsense song and Louis calling, “Mom, where’s my oboe?”
“I’m glad you’re moving back east, Caroline,” I said.
“God, so am I.” There was a muffled pause as she spoke to Louis, and then she returned. “And, Fiona,” she said, “we need to talk about Joe.”
“Sure.” I was hungover, eating potato chips out of the bag, and I paused to lick salt from my fingers. “Joe, sure,” I said, and then we spoke a bit longer about flight arrivals and train times, and then I hung up the phone.
I didn’t think much about why Caroline had mentioned our brother. It was one week before Joe’s engagement party, and I assumed she wanted to discuss the wedding. He was set to marry Sandrine Cahill, a popcorn blonde who worked as an accessories buyer at Barneys. Sandrine grew up outside Chicago, the only child of an industrious midwestern family that presided over the manufacture of something ubiquitous but boring, like computer paper or parts of a car. Sandrine was not objectionable in any obvious way. She came from sensible money, and she worked hard to build on it, yet there was something ruthless in her pursuit of the good life. New York did that, I think, to some people. Sandrine wanted prestige and fancy things. She wanted recognition, and she wanted you to know exactly what she possessed: a front-row seat at Marc Jacobs, perfect abdominals, a position in the Junior League, a dinner reservation at Nobu. I couldn’t stand her, nor could Renee, but Caroline the eternal optimist insisted we were being unfair. Surprisingly, Noni tolerated her, too. I think our mother secretly admired Sandrine, even after the engagement fell apart, for her collection of achievements. I couldn’t help but feel Noni’s comparison and judgment: If only Fiona were such a go-getter! Think what she might accomplish.
On Tuesday morning I took the train from Grand Central Station through the city bustle and vacant lots and gray, low urban sprawl, out past the suburbs proper, and into the wider expanses of green until we reached the small middle- and working-class towns like Danbury and Woodbury and Hamden.
Caroline, in a red coat, waved at me from the platform. “You’re so skinny,” she said as we hugged, and it was neither a compliment nor a complaint. I’d lost another twenty pounds since she’d seen me last Christmas. It was now October.
“Just wait until you see the house,” Caroline said. “It looks exactly like a castle. I think this will be it. Our forever home!” She winked. The forever home had been her black swan for years now. After the third move, from Mississippi to Ohio, Caroline began talking about the forever home the way first-graders talked about the tooth fairy. Could it possibly exist? Would she ever see it?
We drove alongside the Metro-North train tracks and rows of beaten-down bungalows, through Hamden’s low-lying downtown, then past the green college quad and sports fields and into the residential neighborhood where professors lived in rambling old homes with poster boards of KERRY-EDWARDS ’04 perched on every lawn. Caroline accelerated and slowed as she squinted at house numbers. It was late morning, sunny and crisp, trees capped with bright orange leaves. Hamden reminded me so much of Bexley: the same splintery homes, pavement surging with tree roots, the same pumpkins with the same toothy faces. Along the sidewalk, a girl kicked sullenly at leaves, her body thick beneath a pink parka, her legs stout and round as logs. As we passed her in the car, I felt an ache not of nostalgia or grief but something in between the two.
“Here it is,” Caroline said at last, and pulled in to a short, gravelly drive.
The front yard of Caroline’s forever home was covered with damp, unraked leaves and flanked by a row of overgrown shrubs. A fallen tree branch long as the car. A side bed of brittle, brown daisies. A white plastic bag stuck on a bush that flapped in the breeze. Caroline’s eyes swept over the mess, but she didn’t comment on it, just tilted her head back to take stock.
The house was a pale lavender with yellow trim, the paint faded and flaking. Green clumps of moss clung to the steeply pitched roof, and the front steps were grayed and sagging with age. But the place was large, a true Victorian, with tall windows, gabled molding, and, best of all, a rounded towerlike structure with its own pointed roof rising from the second story.
“It’s just like a castle,” Caroline said, turning to me, eager as a puppy for affirmation. It was a look I’d never seen before. I was so young when Caroline left Bexley, and then she’d always lived so far away. And all those blond, clever Goats took possession of Caroline in a way that I understood and resented only years later. They helped her through pregnancies and childbirths. They advised on what kind of minivan to buy, would Montessori be a good fit for Louis, do the twins really need that DTaP vaccine? She let herself be folded into the Duffys, and who could blame her? Two bright, chirpy parents, cousins and family football games at Thanksgiving. The Skinners were too few and too complicated to compete with all that photogenic togetherness.
But now here she was. Her hair hung lank from airplane air, her red coat was too thin for this chilly day. She’d arrived into JFK at five fifteen that morning, traveling all this way for a house she’d seen only in photographs.
“You’re right, Caroline,” I said, and smiled. “A castle.”
We opened the front door and stepped into a damp and penetrating cold. I shivered. We stood at the foot of a wide staircase that led up into darkness. To our left, the large living room was bare, with a sooty fireplace on the far wall that gaped dark and menacing as a wound. There was dust everywhere and a dry brown substance crusting the shadowy corners of the room. The place smelled of mold and something else. Something closed-in, musty, animal.
Caroline dropped the bag of cleaning supplies to the floor.
“I think we might need some help,” I said. “What about Renee or Joe?”
“Renee’s taking on extra ER shifts,” Caroline answered in a monotone. “As if the surgical fellowship isn’t enough. And Joe … I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.” The last she said vaguely, walking away from me into the dim interior of the house.
We went room to room, the only sound our dull footsteps and Caroline’s occasional sharp intake of breath as another mess or sign of age came into view. In the kitchen there was a squat white refrigerator with a long silver handle and a walk-in pantry, its shelves lined with scraps of greasy paper, smelling of old bacon and ammonia. In the hall we found one half bath with an unspeakable toilet. In the dining room, cobwebs intricate as chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
We finished our circle and arrived back in the living room.
“Caroline, can the college find you another house?” I asked gently. The kids and Nathan were set to arrive from Austin in two days.
“Oh, no, this is the only one,” she replied. “It’s rent-to-buy. It’s all we can afford.” Her eyes were bright. “But I love it. It’s perfect. That big front window? These original floors?” She rubbed a toe along a floorboard to reveal a grainy, dark wood beneath the dirt. “Let’s get started.”
And so we began to clean with spray bottles and brushes and paper towels, wearing unwieldy yellow gloves and those small paper masks I associated with Asian flus and hypochondriacs. As we worked side by side, I realized how good it felt to have her back. I’d missed Caroline for herself, but what I’d missed more was the idea of us, the four Skinner siblings, together. She was the missing piece of the puzzle of adulthood that I’d been trying for years to put together here in New York with Joe and Renee. Now I could be the quirky aunt to Caroline’s kids, taking them to gallery shows and poetry readings in the city, teaching them to swear, and buying them candy. Renee would be the role model who showed them how to work hard and succeed, who examined their cut knees with professional concern. And Uncle Joe would tell them fart jokes, give them extravagant electronics for their birthdays, teach them to catch and throw. Joe still loved baseball, even if he no longer played, and who knew? Maybe Louis would be a natural. And here in Hamden, Caroline would host family dinners where we’d all gather and make toasts and drink and eat cake and play Scrabble. At last we would be siblings who were no longer children.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/tara-conklin/the-last-romantics/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Tara Conklin
Sweeping and epic, The Last Romantics is an unforgettable portrait of one perfectly imperfect family – the Skinner siblings – and how the consequences of one fateful summer will change their lives forever.The stunning new novel from the New York Times bestselling author, Tara Conklin.Meet the Skinner siblings: fierce Renée, dreamy Caroline, golden boy Joe and watchful Fiona.Their story begins with the sudden death of their father and a period known as The Pause; one free and feral summer spent at the neighbourhood pond, which will bind the Skinners tightly together, and irrevocably shape the course of their lives.Two decades later, the adult siblings have scattered. But tragedy will draw them back together once again. They’ll be forced to question the life choices they’ve made and ask what, exactly, they will do for love.Beautifully told with warmth and heartbreak, The Last Romantics is a compelling story about family, the ways in which four siblings grow together & apart, the thousand little ways in which they can betray one another – but also how they’ll always find home.
Copyright (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Tara Conklin 2019
From Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf
Published by Hogarth Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 1985
Excerpt of three lines from “The Applicant” from Ariel by Sylvia Plath.
Copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
‘Maps’: Words and Music by Karen Orzolek, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase
Copyright © 2003 Chrysalis Music Ltd.
All Right Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved; Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Cover design by Ploy Siripant © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration by Joel Holland
Tara Conklin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008323349
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008323356
Version: 2019-01-12
Dedication (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Dedicated to the memory of Luella Briody Conklin
and Kenneth Jerome Conklin
For my sisters
Epigraph (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
—Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.
—Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Contents
Cover (#ucaed2190-013d-5d2a-a71c-47c45141c07e)
Title Page (#u210cb9cf-ca70-5f52-9018-ba95f958a8ea)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Year 2079
Part I: Bexley (#u21d5ef27-8f6d-5275-9cab-69d43ca35a38)
Chapter 1 (#u95589c2b-5aa1-55e1-972c-869c4115c013)
Chapter 2 (#u5c9480ba-36c0-573f-931c-81d11f367b64)
Chapter 3 (#u7d0f8f5e-63a9-55f8-98d4-efc528813ea9)
Chapter 4 (#u838c3111-dd28-5914-aee9-41953b198acf)
Part II: New York City (#u31bff54a-f2c8-5e36-a986-2974762cab02)
Year 2079 (#ub294129c-5af1-5191-a862-f9cf688185f8)
Chapter 5 (#u7f0d31e1-094c-5058-b1b8-671966cd9829)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III: Miami (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: After (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Tara Conklin (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
AT FIRST I believed the girl to be an apparition. A ghost. She rose from the crowd in the auditorium and walked to the microphone.
I remained very still. For the past ninety minutes, I had been seated onstage to discuss my body of work. As much as I dread large crowds, the event had been a success. The audience was respectful, intelligent, curious. I’d even made them laugh. That joke about the frog, of all things. We heard the sirens only once, a brief wail during which I paused my reading. We all waited, the thousand here in the auditorium and the thousands more watching via satellite and DTR. We waited, and then the sirens quieted, and I resumed with my poem.
Afterward the questions. So many questions! My first public event in twenty-five years—of course there would be questions, but I was not prepared for the intensity, the thoroughness with which these people had read my work. It still surprises me now, eighty years into this literary experiment, that my words might mean something to anyone other than myself.
I am 102 years old and a poet of some renown. My name is Fiona Skinner.
When the girl stepped forward, my attention was elsewhere. My energy low. I wondered what snack Henry had waiting for me backstage and hoped it was the candy with the peanut butter in the center, my favorite. My thoughts fixed on other comforts: the tall, soft bed in my house in the mountains; the river stocked with trout; the deep, cold well; the generator with its soothing hum. We never heard the sirens there, no, the nearest town was too far. It was a safe place, our house, a place beyond the reach of politics and rising oceans. At least that’s what I chose to believe. It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.
The girl at the microphone was an arresting sight: slender and tall, a dark bob cut short and sharp to her chin. She looked eighteen, perhaps twenty years old. Not a girl, then, nearly a woman.
The crowd was silent. She coughed into her hand. “Ms. Skinner,” she began. “My name is Luna.”
“Luna?” I said, and my voice caught, my breath stilled. For a moment I traveled back all those years to a different place and time. At last, I thought. Luna has returned.
“Yes. My mother named me after the last line of The Love Poem,” she said.
“Oh, of course.” I smiled. Henry had told me about this, the popularity of the name. The Love Poem had that effect on some readers. They wanted to keep a piece of it. And here was one of those babies, now grown, standing before me. Another Luna.
The girl’s face was half in shadow. I saw a mole high on her right cheek. About the size of a dime. A birthmark. A dark kiss.
“My mother always wanted to ask you about the name,” Luna continued. “She’d memorized the last pages at school. When my brother and I were little, she’d recite them at dinner if we were feeling down.” Her face became soft with the memory. “The Love Poem meant so much to her. I want to know, for my mother. Who was your inspiration? Who was Luna?”
The auditorium went still. Onstage the lights had become hot, but a cold spread through me, ice flooding my veins. I shivered. A sweat rose along my hairline. It was a question I’d always refused to answer publicly. And privately; even Henry didn’t know the truth. But of course I should have expected it tonight. Isn’t that why I’d agreed to speak one last time? Isn’t that why I was here? To finally tell this story.
An old regret lodged in my throat, blocking my voice. I coughed.
“Luna is the Spanish word for moon, of course,” I said. “In the poem itself, there are many metaphors, many symbols that mean different things. I wrote it seventy-five years ago, my dear. Your mother, you, anyone here”—I waved my palm at the audience—“you know what the poem means more than I do now.”
The Luna standing before me shook her head in frustration. A lock of hair fell into her eyes, and she pushed it away. “No. I mean the real woman. My mother always said there was someone named Luna.”
I straightened my spine and heard the bones crack, a minor internal disruption. I wasn’t often put on the spot. At home I had a gardener, a personal assistant, a housekeeper, a cook. I lived with my second husband, Henry, but I ran the house and gave the orders. Some might say I’m imposing. I prefer to think of it as self-assured. This girl was also self-assured, I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the purse of her lips.
How to describe the first Luna? I met Luna Hernandez only once. On a night when the wind threw tree branches onto the road and leaves whirled in crazy circles. Decades ago, a lifetime ago. That Luna had grown and changed in my mind until I hardly saw her anymore. Were her eyes brown or gray? The mole, was it high on the right cheek or the left? Had it been remorse I saw on her face that night or merely dismissal?
“I wrote a poem about love,” I began, addressing the crowd. “But there are certain limitations. There are certain failings. I’ve always been wary of love, you see. Its promises are too dizzy, its reasons too vague, its origins murkier than mud.” Here I heard a chuckle from the audience. “Yes, mud!” I called in the direction of the laugh. “When I was young, I tried dissecting love, setting it up on a table with a good strong light and poking, prodding, slicing. For years I believed it possible to identify the crux, the core, and that once you found this essential element you might tend it like a rose and grow something beautiful. Back then I was a romantic. I didn’t understand that there’s no stopping betrayal. If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”
I paused.
“You’re not answering the question,” Luna said; her arms were now crossed against her chest, her chin down.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. “In these difficult times, stories are important. In a sense, stories are all we have to tell us about the future.”
Luna moved away from the microphone. She was listening intently, everyone was, shoulders pitched just slightly forward, curious and alert.
“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a father and a mother and four children, three girls and one boy. They lived together in a house like any other house, in a town like many other towns, and for a time they were happy.” I paused, and all those faces in the auditorium stared down on me, all those eyes. “And then—” I stopped again, faltering. I sipped my glass of water. “And then there was the Pause. Everything started there. Our mother didn’t mean for it to happen, she didn’t, but this is a story about the failures of love, and the Pause was the first.”
PART I (#ulink_028d1112-3e63-5d31-b4c9-192a104fa2b6)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_4444ca04-eeaa-52cb-960c-6ab82ba34176)
IN THE SPRING of 1981, our father died. His name was Ellis Avery Skinner, thirty-four years old, a small bald lozenge at the back of his head that he covered every morning with a few hopeful strands. We lived in the middle-class town of Bexley, Connecticut, where our father owned and operated a dental practice. At the moment his heart stopped, he was pulling on a pair of blue rubber gloves while one of his afternoon patients, a Mrs. Lipton, lay before him on the padded recliner, breathing deeply from a sweet mask of chloroform.
“Oh!” our father said, and toppled sideways to the floor.
“Dr. Skinner?” Mrs. Lipton sat up. She was unsteady, groggy, and afraid as she looked down at our father on the floor. He twitched once, twice, and then Mrs. Lipton began to scream.
The look on his face, she later reported to our mother, was one of surrender and absolute surprise.
Our mother was thirty-one years old. She’d never held a full-time job and possessed a degree in English literature from Colby College in her home state of Maine that sat unframed in an upstairs closet. Her dark hair hung like two pressed curtains framing the window of her face. Her eyes were wide and brown, with sparse lashes and narrow lids that gave an impression of watchfulness and exposure. Her name was Antonia, though everyone called her Noni, and it was decided long before my birth that her children should call her Noni, too.
The day of our father’s funeral was dank, mid-March. Ronald Reagan was president, the Cold War dragged on, Star Wars had made us all believe in forces we could not see. At that time Bexley was a town where people greeted each other by name at the post office or the bank and no one cared who had money and who did not. The doctor and the mill worker both visited my father for root canals, and both drank beer at the same drafty tavern. The dark Punnel River meandered along the east side of town and gave us something to do on summer days. This was still the era when a ninety-minute commute to New York City seemed absurd, and so the people who lived in Bexley, for the most part, worked in Bexley.
It was no surprise when the whole town turned out for our father’s funeral. Hundreds, it seemed to me. Thousands. Noni led us through that awful day with an iron grip on two of our eight hands. She alternated, she did not play favorites. She had four children, and we all needed to feel the warmth of her palm.
Renee, the eldest of us, was eleven years old. Long, thin limbs, chestnut hair she wore in a single braid down her back. Even as a child, Renee exuded competence and self-containment, and at the funeral she was no different. She did not cry or make a fuss when her tights ran up the back. She helped Noni with us, the younger ones, and tried not to look directly at the casket.
After Renee came Caroline, who was eight, and then Joe, who was seven. Caroline was the fairest of us, with cheeks pink as bubble gum and hair that streaked blond in the summers. Joe was the boy, the only boy, with floppy hands and large feet and a stubborn right-side cowlick that he was forever flipping away from his face. Joe and Caroline both had a tawny glow and quick, broad grins and were mistaken so frequently for twins that sometimes even they forgot there was a year between them.
And then came me, Fiona, the youngest, four years and eight months old on the day our father died. I was a pudgy child with soft, dimpled knees and unruly reddish hair that frizzed and flamed around my freckled face. My looks contrasted so vividly with those of my lithe, golden siblings that neighbors raised eyebrows. A tilt of the head, a shadow of gossipy doubt passing behind the eyes. Bexley, Connecticut, was like that. Working-class New Englanders starched in Puritan ethics. Their nails were dirty, but their souls were clean. After our father’s death, the gossip stopped. Widowhood trumped the suggestion of infidelity. In her grief Noni became infallible, untouchable.
I remember very little about my father while he was alive, but the day we buried him I recall in great detail. At the cemetery a racket of crows flew above the casket. Our priest, Father Johns, delivered remarks in tones that rose and fell like a fitful storm; I could not understand a word of it. The ground was mushy with thaw, but crusts of snow still lurked beneath trees and along the shadowy side of the marble mausoleum that sat up on a low hill behind the grave site.
The mausoleum resembled a house: front steps, a peaked roof, the appearance of windows. It was so much larger and more impressive than the tidy headstone Noni had chosen for our father’s grave. I was more interested in the mausoleum than I was in Father Johns, and so I ran away from the funeral, around the back of the crowd, and up the hill. The mausoleum stones were a deep gray, speckled with rain spots and age, significant and somber. Along the top I sounded out the name GARRISON H. CLARK. And then: BELOVED FATHER, HUSBAND, SON, BROTHER, COLLEAGUE, FRIEND.
Down the small hill, Father Johns spoke in a dull, deep voice. From a distance, finally, I could make out the words:
“Too soon …”
“Great burden …”
“Do not ask …”
Noni’s head was bowed; she hadn’t noticed my absence. Noni was Catholic and felt it in her knees that ached from all the praying but not, she realized that day, in her heart. This was the last time she would entertain the rituals of organized religion, the last day she would bow her head to the words of a man wearing white.
From my position on the hill, the mourners looked similar to the crows, only bigger and quieter, perched on the yellowish green of the spring grass that cut abruptly to the darkness of earth beside the casket. I thought of how little space there was on our father’s stone. How unassuming it was, how meager, nothing like Garrison H. Clark’s showy marble mausoleum. Standing beneath a stranger’s name, gazing down at my father’s funeral, for the first time that day I began to cry.
* * *
WE LIVED IN a yellow house, a three-story Colonial on a street lined with arching maples and oaks that threw down acorns in the spring and curling red and orange leaves in the fall. There was a steep, clattery staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs and a basement that smelled faintly of mold and scorched sheets. In the backyard we had a metal swing set, and a sandbox used regularly by the neighborhood cats, and flower beds of nasturtium, lavender, gardenia, and clematis tended diligently by Noni.
After our father’s funeral, people began to arrive at the yellow house. Everyone from church and others, too, people I had never seen before, people who knew my name and crouched to say it: “Fiona! Darling Fi!”
Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Granger, took the plates covered in plastic wrap, the Tupperware containers in pastel shades, and bustled away to place them on the dining-room table. It struck me as odd to see Mrs. Granger perform this role, which seemed more properly to belong to Noni. But she remained on the orange couch, a white handkerchief moving from face to lap, face to lap, as strangers knelt before her, bowing their heads as though she bestowed upon them some sort of honor. She had never looked less like our mother.
The black of Noni’s dress, the orange of the couch, and the white of the handkerchief reminded me of Halloween, and I felt a strange, empty excitement. A near hysteria. Plus all the food. Everywhere! Bowls of green grapes and Chex Mix and hard butterscotch candies and potato chips. Platters of ham-and-cheese sandwiches cut into neat triangles, cubes of watermelon that leaked pink juice onto the white tablecloth. I grabbed what I could and ate it quickly, unsure as to what was permitted here, what would be allowed.
It soon became clear that anything was allowed when your father has died. I spied Joe beneath a table with an entire bowl of hard candies and three cans of Coca-Cola. Caroline took off her tights and sprawled on the floor, singing to herself; Renee sat on a rocking chair and picked with great concentration at an elbow scab, ignoring the adult who stood before her, saying her name again and again in a calm, sympathetic voice.
I ran crazily around the room. I slapped various bottoms and did not apologize. I picked my nose and wiped my finger on the coffee table. No one stopped me or spoke to me or noticed me at all. The freedom was exhausting. I climbed unsteadily into Renee’s lap. She wore a stiff black dress and black tights that she pulled at as I settled against her. With a shoeless toe, she rocked the chair back and forth, back and forth. The movement soothed me like a ship on the sea or a car on a bumpy road. This is how I would always imagine Renee: as a steadiness in times of turmoil.
I was on Renee’s lap when it began. I don’t know what triggered Joe’s fury. I know only that he got hold of a fireplace poker, sooty at its tip, cast iron, heavy. About the length of a baseball bat.
Joe began in the dining room and moved steadily, ferociously through the house. He did not strike people, only things. There was the sound of wood splintering, glass shattering, dull thumps and sickening crashes as he brought the poker down again and again on a table, a chair, those many bowls and platters of food. The noise startled me, but I didn’t cry. I listened. We all listened. Muted conversations and quiet tears gave way to a nervous, cowardly hush.
Crash. Into the living room he came. The crystal bowl full of hard candies, the porcelain table lamp with a linen shade, Noni’s collection of delicate glassware cats—all crashed and shattered to the floor. Joe paused before the piano, and then he took aim at the photographs that stood on top: pictures of what we, the Skinners, had been until that day. Six together. Ellis and Antonia, Renee and Caroline and Joe and little Fiona. Crash. Six together on windswept New England beaches and before tinselly Christmas trees, grinning and mugging, arms over shoulders, holding hands. Crash. We were gap-toothed children and anonymous infants, full-cheeked within our swaddles. Our parents were proud and exhausted, bright, blameless, beautiful even in their polyester and plaid. Crash. All of it, gone.
I waited for someone to stop Joe, but no one did. The room echoed with the noise of his destruction, grunts and strained inhalations, but otherwise there was silence. No one spoke. No one moved to stop him. Even Noni remained on the couch, her face pale and stricken. I wondered then, and I would wonder for the rest of my life: why did our mother not take the poker from Joe’s grasp, wrap her arms around him, tell him that everything would be okay?
Finally Joe paused. At seven years old, he already stood four feet tall. A borrowed black suit showed his pale ankles and pale, knobby wrists. Plaster dust had settled in his hair, onto the shoulders of his suit, ghosting his skin. With a free hand, he wiped sweat from his forehead.
Then a man’s voice called out. To this day I have no idea who spoke, but one could say he changed the course of Joe’s life, of all our lives. “Antonia,” the voice said. “Your boy’s got quite an arm. It’d be a shame if he didn’t play some baseball.”
Someone chuckled. A child began to cry. With a dull thud, Joe dropped the poker. Renee removed me from her lap, and went to him. “Joe,” she said. His hands shook, and she took one in her own. Caroline sprinted across the room in her bare feet and threw her arms around him. I followed, stumbling like a drunk from sleepiness and overstimulation, and wrapped myself around Joe’s calves and feet.
I believe this was the moment when we each assumed responsibility for our brother, Joe. A lifelong obligation of love that each of us, for different reasons, would not fulfill. We would try: Renee in her studied, worrisome way; Caroline carelessly with great bursts of energy followed by distraction; and myself, quiet and tentative, assuming that Joe would never need me, not in the way that I needed him. Years later this assumption would prove to be wrong. But by then it would be too late.
* * *
THE FIRST THING Noni did after all the funeral food was eaten and we had returned to school was to inquire about Little League baseball for Joe. She could focus on one thing at a time, she thought. If she tried to fix everyone all at once, she would fail, she would fall to the floor and never get up again. It’s important to take small steps. This was what Mrs. Cooperton, our neighbor the social worker, told her at the funeral. One day at a time. Cross one thing off your list at a time.
Noni worried that Joe would lack a strong male presence in his life, and that worry eclipsed all others. Her inquiries returned the name of a baseball coach, Marty Roach, who was famous in Bexley. For twenty-three years he’d taught young boys the nature of teamwork and the beauty of a well-thrown ball. His office, Noni had heard, was festooned with birthday cards sent by former players, men now, who had moved on to cities and careers but harbored an enduring affection for old Coach Marty. This was what Noni wanted. Someone who would endure for Joe.
“Looks like the roster’s already full,” the man on the phone told her. “But for you, Mrs. Skinner, we can fit one more.”
Noni brought us all to that first practice. The team met at the Bexley High School playing field, which was rough, chewed-up grass bordered to the north by a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence lay thick scrub, densely packed bushes, brambles, and spindly pines that eventually thickened and stretched into the forest that covered Packensatt Peak, the closest thing to a mountain that Bexley could claim. High-school kids liked to jump the fence and wander into this wilderness to smoke and drink and light fires and have faltering, unforgettable sex. Noni looked across the field to the tangled trees and saw a defensive line holding steady against an encroaching disorder.
On the field a dozen boys stood in a row, a loose knot of fathers beside them. The air smelled of wet leaves and sweetness from the mulch that sat in huge piles around the field’s southern perimeter, spring preparation for later plantings. Off to the side was Marty Roach. Maybe it was the suggestion of the surname, but I had never before seen a man who so closely resembled an insect. He was short and stocky, with burly shoulders, a dark, ample mustache, and large meat-hook hands. Sparse black hair striped the white dome of his scalp, and I thought that at any moment antennae would sprout from his forehead. He looked designed to survive in hardy conditions, to find forgotten crumbs in a clean kitchen. Noni shook his hand uneasily.
“Hiya, Joe,” he said, leaning down to look my brother in the eye. “Ready to play?” He inclined his head toward the row of boys.
Joe nodded once and stepped away from Noni, took his place in line.
“Now, boys,” Marty said, stretching his arms out wide. “Today is our first day as a team. We are all learning our roles. As teammates you will come to rely on one another. You will come to know one another like brothers.” Coach Marty paused. “But for today let’s just have some fun.”
We sat in the stands with Noni and watched as boys threw balls to their fathers with loose, inelegant gestures. Marty stood alone with Joe and showed him how to hold a bat, swing evenly from the waist, trap a ball within the webbed leather of his glove. After a spell the boys divided into teams and began to scrimmage. Joe positioned himself in center field, just behind second base, where he looked both in the thick of it and dismally alone. Poor Joe, I thought. He stepped from one foot to the other, rubbed his nose, took off his hat and put it on again. The other players laughed or talked or waved to their fathers. Oh, poor Joe.
Batters took their turns at the plate. There were futile swings, dropped bats, tears. Finally a round-bellied blond stepped up. He was short but powerful, clearly experienced. A father lobbed a gentle pitch, the boy swung hard, and—crack—the ball arced forward into the field. And then, all at once, it was Joe like a toy on a spring who came up high to catch the ball. The force of the ball hitting Joe’s glove—whomp—took me by surprise.
The blond boy pulled up from running, a look of shock and dismay on his face.
“Wow! Great catch!” Marty called to Joe.
We clapped wildly, my sisters and Noni and I. Joe gave us a small wave. He smiled. Beside me on the bleachers, I felt Noni expand in the way of a hungry lung filling at last with air. She waved back at Joe.
* * *
AFTER BASEBALL BEGAN for Joe, one worry relaxed but others rose up to replace it.
Sometimes after dinner I heard Noni muttering. “One thing at a time,” she would say. “One thing. One thing.”
The casseroles stopped appearing on our doorstep. Our teachers stopped asking how we were holding up and gazing at us with grave, kindly faces. I slept soundly now. Joe and Renee, too. Only Caroline still suffered nightmares, terrifying dreams of darkness and a child with evil eyes. But after a spell, we became accustomed to Caroline’s bad dreams, and so it seemed, in a way, a return to normalcy.
One thing at a time. One thing.
Sometimes Noni yelled and threw objects at the wall—pencils and books and staplers. Papers littered the kitchen table and the study and Noni’s bedroom. At night Noni worried over a big gray calculator. We wandered in and kissed her and asked her to put us to bed, but she would say, “In a minute, just give me a minute,” and so we put ourselves to bed. We fell asleep atop the covers to the sound of Noni punching numbers with a jagged index finger, sharp and insistent.
Three months after our father died, we moved from our yellow house to a gray one-story ranch six miles away. This house had no stairs or swing set or much of a backyard, only a strip of gravel and a rectangle of sparse, yellowed grass that backed against a tall wooden fence. In the front yard sat a single tree, a large, humbling locust that threw a rough blanket of shade over the house. We loved our yellow house and cried more bitterly for this loss than we had for our father.
“We have no money,” Noni explained. “I’m sorry. Your daddy never told me we were out of money.”
It was June when we moved. School was out. Low-relief mounds of mosquito bites marked my legs, red and itchy and bleeding from my attentions. On that sticky, heavy day, we all rode with Noni in the long front seat of the U-Haul. Joe sat closest to the window, and he alone craned his neck to watch the yellow house disappear behind us.
We helped Noni unpack the towels and sheets, the plates and silverware, our summer clothes, our books. Renee and Caroline would now share a room. Joe was down the hall, closest to the bathroom. I would sleep in a small, tucked-away space that had a low ceiling and no windows. Our old things looked wrong in the new rooms. At any moment I expected someone—our father perhaps—to pop out from behind a door and say Surprise! or What a hoot!, which were things our father used to say.
For dinner that first night, we sat on the couch and ate spaghetti with sauce from a jar. Accidentally we had arranged ourselves by age: Renee beside Caroline beside Joe beside me. I was wearing my nightgown, a short one, and the nubby orange upholstery itched against the backs of my thighs. The skin around our mouths was stained pink from the tomato sauce.
“Kids,” Noni said. She was standing in front of the couch. Unpacked boxes lined the walls. In the kitchen dirty dishes filled the sink.
“Yes?” said Renee.
“Kids,” Noni said again. “I’m feeling tired. Very tired.” Her hair hung lank around her face, her eyes gazed out from deep inside her head. The bones around her neck were thin and pronounced. They looked delicate, easy to break.
“I need some rest,” Noni said. “Okay?” She gazed from one of us to the other, her eyebrows up.
Caroline, Joe, and I all turned to Renee: she was the eldest, she was the one who knew how to answer our mother.
“Don’t worry, Noni,” said Renee. “I can do it.”
Noni nodded once as though something had been decided. She bent to each of us and hugged us, kissed us on our heads. There was a tickle of hair against my cheek, and then she disappeared down the long, dark hall to her bedroom.
Our mother did not emerge for three days. Then six. Then four. Then six again. This continued. Occasionally she would appear to cook dinner. Or ask us about our day. Or preside over a cut knee, a sunburned shoulder, a snotty nose. But primarily she rested in her room, door closed, curtains drawn, lights off. A bubble of darkened quiet that we feared to disrupt. How long did it last? Renee later claimed three years, give or take. Joe put it closer to two. When we were older, we called this period “the Pause,” but back then we had no words to describe it. We pretended that it was okay. This was temporary, we told ourselves. We must wait for Noni to finish resting. We must wait patiently for her to return.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_acff14f4-59dd-5d1f-8fd6-b02af016bab4)
THAT FIRST SUMMER we went feral. Joe and I became wild things, twigs in our hair, skin brown and dirty and scraped. Renee and Caroline tried to remain more respectable, more mature, but they, too, bore the marks of neglect and adventure. The house was never clean. We pulled what we needed from the cardboard boxes but did not unpack them fully. We played games, built forts, constructed castles that stayed up for days and then scattered underfoot as we played indoor tag or wrestled or fought. We slept in the clothes we wore all day, we did not brush our teeth, we bathed only when we began to smell ourselves or when Renee stripped off our clothes, pushed us under the shower, and turned on the tap. We ate food with our hands straight from the refrigerator or from the box of groceries that arrived every Friday, delivered by the stock boy, Jimmy, from the Bexley corner store. The food we received was odd or close to spoiling—leftovers, we came to see, unsellable. Charity. We were often hungry. We were always barefoot.
Joe and I explored our new neighborhood: only six miles from our old house, but it felt foreign. Another state, another country. There were people with brown skin, head scarves, tattoos. The houses were small, and domestic life spilled from windows and doors in ways that would have been unthinkable in our old neighborhood. In front yards men sat on beach chairs and drank from dull brown bottles. Women yelled at their children, who ran naked through a flicking sprinkler. A teenage girl blew smoke in practiced rings up toward the summer sky.
In twenty years Bexley would be deemed a commuter town and new expensive homes, new box stores, would arrive, but in 1981 it was small, forgotten, besieged by inflation and unemployment. On Bexley’s east side sat an abandoned mill where industrial furniture was once made for colleges and hospitals. Decades before, the company brought in workers from the city, settled them in cheap houses outfitted with the company’s own cheap wares. Now the mill stood empty, brooding, a sprawling, static octopus with graffitied tentacles of red brick and cracked windows and one tall, grimy smokestack for a head. All around the perimeter were scattered raw wooden boards, chairs with stuffing torn from seat cushions, tables with splintered stumps instead of legs.
Before the Pause, Noni often drove past the building, and always I would gaze at it with the fear and delight of a cowardly voyeur. During the Pause, Noni no longer drove, and so we had no occasion to pass the factory. But sometimes in bed at night, I imagined it: moonlight hitting the broken windowpanes, rats and cats and raccoons nosing through the interior, biting one another, fighting, scratching the furniture, defecating in empty rooms. I imagined a busy darkness, a dismantling that must be carried out under cover of night. The mysteries of the factory seemed to me similar to the mystery of Noni. Inside, invisible forces were at work, and they were full of a secret rage.
Our friends receded that summer. We couldn’t walk to the old neighborhood. Noni had instructed us to use the telephone only for emergencies. And besides, it soon became clear that our friends had returned to their normal lives, lives where groceries must be bought, dinners cooked, television shows watched, where loved ones were bothersome but healthy and alive. We reminded them of the constant threat of calamity. How quickly it could all go to pieces.
* * *
ON THE MORNING of my fifth birthday, Noni emerged to bake me a cake. We all watched as she lined up the ingredients on the kitchen counter: an ancient tin of baking powder, a wrapped square of hardened brown sugar. We did not volunteer to help. It seemed too risky. To us our mother was an exotic animal, a gazelle perhaps, that might startle if we moved too fast, spoke too loudly.
There was the soft drop of the sifted flour, the crack of the eggs, the steady buzz of the mixer, and then—ping—out of the oven came the cake, all golden and puffed up like my own private sun. We each ate a thick slab of cake, Noni, too, and then she kissed me and walked again down the hall, the thready hem of her bathrobe skimming the floor.
She closed the door to her bedroom.
I burst into tears.
Renee, Caroline, and Joe exchanged looks. Caroline hid a smile with her hand.
“Fiona,” Renee said, “Joe’s got a surprise.”
Out the front door Joe disappeared, and when he returned, in his arms was a small rabbit. It struggled with kicking surges to escape, but Joe held it close to his chest.
“Happy Birthday, Fi,” he said.
My heart surged with excitement as Joe brought the rabbit to me. Gently he placed it into my arms. I stroked its soft fur, its beating heart a rapid tapping against my palm. The fur was black and gray, except for white around the rabbit’s eyes and on its stomach. The rabbit looked very scared, but Joe talked in a slow voice and I used my softest hands, my gentlest touch.
“Where did she come from?” I asked.
Joe whispered, “A secret.”
Outside in the backyard, Joe helped me set up an enclosure of sorts with some broken-down boxes for a fence, a wooden crate propped on its side for shelter, and one cereal bowl for water, another for food. I named the rabbit Celeste after the elephant queen in the Babar books.
Every morning I fed my rabbit carrots and wilted lettuce and the small green apples that fell from the trees in the park. Celeste was not a delicate eater. Her nose moved together with her mouth in a grasping motion, and the food vanished quickly. I loved the quick motion of her eyes. I loved her long legs with their loping, circular movement like she was riding a bicycle. I loved her smell of musk and clean, fresh grass and even the dry, perfectly shaped pellets of dung that sat in tidy piles around her pen.
Joe loved Celeste, too. For weeks we studied her. We determined what she liked best to eat, where she most enjoyed a scratch, when she was most amenable to a cuddle, and when she preferred to play. Joe liked to feed her long blades of grass, the ends disappearing smoothly into her mouth as though she slurped spaghetti.
We doted on Celeste for one month, maybe two, and then she vanished. When I arrived one morning to feed her as I always did, her pen was empty. It was August, the days slow to start, humidity thick as fudge. Joe helped me search the bushes in the yard and took me down the street, calling “Celeste! Celeste!” until the dew burned off and we were both sweaty, pink-faced, still wearing our pajamas.
I wept as Joe carried me home.
“Fiona, listen,” Joe said. “Celeste had to go back to live with her rabbit brothers and sisters.” He set me down in the front yard. My tears had wet his pajama top. Stripes of snot glistened on his shoulder.
“Really?” I said. I hadn’t considered this possibility.
“Have you ever heard the term ‘reproduce like rabbits’?” said Joe. “All rabbits have so many brothers and sisters! The most of any species.” Joe was eight and wise in every single way.
I stopped crying. I believed my brother. All at once I felt ashamed for keeping Celeste imprisoned for so many weeks. I was glad that now she had returned home. It would be a terrible thing, I thought, to be separated from your siblings.
* * *
MY GRIEF FOR Celeste lasted exactly five days. Then Joe brought me to the pond.
It was another hot, sticky morning, and I lay on the couch reading War of the Worlds and imagining where I would hide from an alien invasion. I was a precocious and prolific reader, often stealing Renee’s books or ones from the cardboard boxes we had yet to unpack, generally preferring to exist within my own made-up world rather than the real one that surrounded me.
“Come here,” Joe said, standing in the doorway. “I want to show you something.”
I narrowed my eyes, examining his face, and then put the book down.
He led me along the sidewalk, through a neighbor’s backyard, over a low fence, and down a steep, wooded hill. The going was rough—no real path, heavy vegetation, and fallen tree trunks. Shifting spots of sun played with my eyes, and I tripped and fell. Joe helped me up, then swung me onto his shoulders, and I rode like this down the hill, ducking sharp branches, holding tight with my legs around his shoulders, my arms around his neck.
Finally the woods thinned, and Joe lifted me down. Before us was a shallow, sun-speckled brook that twisted through the trees.
“Ta-da!” Joe said, as though he were a magician and this his finest trick. It was cool here, calm, the water talking quietly to itself, the fizz of dragonflies and the airy whine of mosquitoes.
“Let’s stay,” I said.
For the next few hours, we played on the rocks beside the brook. We did not speak. We threw stones. We crouched and watched the spindly-legged water bugs skitter across the surface. We fashioned fishing poles from sticks and bits of long grass tied to the ends, but we had no bait and the quick, darting minnows ignored our efforts, instead flashing silver as they poked and picked algae from the rocks like housewives choosing melons. We walked downstream, the brook widening as it went. The sound of rushing water grew louder, and then the woods cleared and before us shimmered a small green pond set like a jewel amid the trees and the long cattails. On the far side was a dam with water rushing beyond it in turbulent free fall.
Duck grass and bunches of loosestrife grew along the perimeter, lily pads, too, with their hand-size leaves and stiff flowers like divination rods. There was a low grassy bank, perfect for sitting, and a small beach area of gray sand and pebbles. No one else was here, but I saw evidence of activity: a battered little rowboat overturned on the grass, a crushed soda can, a few orange cigarette butts, one marked with the dull red of lipstick. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.
“Joe!” I called. “Can we go in?”
Joe didn’t answer, just pulled off his shirt and jumped from the bank into the water. I stripped off my sundress and tiptoed across the sand. My feet, ankles, knees, thighs entered the water, and the cold advanced with an excruciating certainty that was lovely and painful all at once. Beyond the narrow strip of sand, the bottom of the pond was thick with mud and slime. I felt it squirt between my toes, my feet sinking deeper with each step. The cold clutched at my hips, my stomach, my bare chest, and it was only then I remembered that I could not swim.
My feet lost their grip on the slippery bottom. My head slid under smoothly, silently. My mind registered only surprise: at the cold, at the heavy silence, at the quality of the underwater light—green and glancing gold—and the fine algae that drifted like mossy snowflakes in the water. I waved my arms, and the algae spun crazily, an explosion of green particles unburdened by gravity. In the distance I made out the bulging eyes and long, spiked mustache of a catfish.
I wanted to stay here. It was beautiful and strange in a way that the gray house and our new life were not. That life was only strange, only coarse and dirty. Underwater in the pond was the first time I felt wonder.
And then Joe’s strong hand gripped my shoulder and he hauled me up out of the gold and out of the wonder. I inhaled, and the cold water invaded me. I thought I’d swallowed a minnow, a whole school of minnows, and their sharp silver bodies cut deeply into the interior spaces of my nose and chest.
“Fiona!” Joe cried. I coughed and sputtered as Joe pulled me onto the grass. I lay on the bank heaving and then vomited in one satisfying, emptying gasp.
The look on Joe’s face was terrible. “Fi, are you okay? I’m so sorry. This was so stupid. So stupid. Noni never taught you to swim, did she?” He hit his forehead with his hand.
“I’m okay.” My voice was a rough croak. I cleared it and repeated, “Joe, I’m okay.” It felt odd, me reassuring Joe who so often reassured me. The pain in my chest expanded at the sight of my brother in such distress. “Joe, you saved me,” I said.
Joe had already started to grow into himself. In one short season, he’d become a standout on his Little League team. His hands were huge, his feet huge, too, his shoulders skinny and boyish but broad, his waist narrow. He was shaped like a kite trailing streamers of pond water as he stood above me. He looked at me with his dark blue eyes and slicked-back hair, and his face transformed into a sort of relief.
“Save you?” he said. “I guess I did.” And Joe smiled.
* * *
THAT SUMMER JOE taught me how to swim. Every day we walked to the pond with towels and swimsuits and sandwiches. We started slowly, Joe’s hands on the small of my back, my arms circling, legs kicking up a flurry of water as I struggled to suspend myself. It took one week, and then I was floating on my back without assistance, my arms outstretched like the points of a star, hair spread around me.
“Next, dog-paddle,” Joe directed, and I knew that he was proud of me. I was not a quick study. I did not take easily to physical activity and was disposed to fall back on complaints of a sprained ankle, a shortness of breath.
One of the many miracles of the pond was that here, in the water, my physical self disappeared. The feeling was delicious. As I tilted my head back atop the surface of the water, a cold rushing filled my ears and I became weightless. This was a sensation I would remember some twenty years later, when I at last would lose the weight that since childhood had circled my body like a sleeping python. Unencumbered is the word I would use in poems to describe it. And also: Untethered. Unrestricted. Expansive. Free. I felt it first in the pond with Joe beside me in the water.
Renee soon turned suspicious. “Where are you guys going?” she asked one morning. She walked to Joe and sniffed his hair. “You smell fishy,” she said.
Renee and Caroline spent their days primarily indoors in front of the fan, where it was cool. They braided each other’s hair and made papier-mâché bowls and beads and masks by wrapping gluey strips of newspaper around the various items they wished to replicate. When they were tired of making things, they watched The Brady Bunch or The A-Team on rerun or sometimes a program that showed a man painting oil landscapes, his voice so calm that it stupefied them. They learned from this man nothing about painting, only that it was possible to spend your entire day in a sort of daze, half awake, half asleep, and at the end of it to feel jumpy and restless but entirely worn out from heat and boredom.
Renee sniffed Joe’s hair again. “Take us,” she said.
Joe and I led our sisters down the road, down the steep hill, along the bank of the brook through the woods until we reached the pond. The day was very hot, and the mere sight of the dark water cooled me off. The rushing sound operated as a hush on us all. Maples and slender birches arched over the pond. The current was weak and nearly invisible. Over the dam the water spilled like a silver cloth pulled through a wringer.
Renee let out a whistle. “Awesome,” she said.
Immediately I resented the presence of my sisters. This was our place, mine and Joe’s, and their intrusion altered the feel of it. Caroline wore a bikini and spread her towel in a sprinkling of sun. Renee began to patrol the bank in search of frogs. Yesterday I’d seen a large one, a bullfrog with a call like a rock dropping down a well, but I didn’t tell Renee. I let her search.
“Fi, let’s practice swimming,” said Joe. I scowled at him, but he lifted his eyebrows, and his face said, This is still our place. We can share with the others, it doesn’t change what we have found.
And so I relented. I let Joe place me into the water, stomach down. His hands buoyed me up, and I kicked my legs, circled my arms. I didn’t swim that day or the next, but it happened soon, that perfect moment when my body stopped being mere weight and became like the water itself: fluid, joyful, effortless. It was Joe who made this happen, Joe who clapped the loudest as I swam from bank to bank.
Over the course of that summer, Caroline and I developed a game. Inside the gray house, we rarely played together, but outside at the pond the rules shifted, expectations changed. She and I would scour the brook for water-rough pieces of broken glass or other strange treasures. The rocky bottom was full of odd detritus, perhaps castoffs from the old furniture mill or wayward bits from the town dump. Once we found a large silver spoon, then a crusty broken bicycle chain, then a small green bottle. We would arrange these treasures carefully and make up elaborate stories about their provenance and the lengths to which their previous owners would go to reclaim them. Before the Pause, Noni raised us on fairy tales and fantastic stories. Princesses and queens, mothers and trolls, a dashing prince, salvation, and a perfect everlasting love. The pond offered the perfect backdrop for magical possibility.
For weeks Caroline and I discussed the owner of the spoon, a wily queen from a distant, frozen place who became angry at her daughter and threw the spoon at the poor girl. The daughter ducked, and the spoon sailed over her defenseless head, across nations, oceans, time, and landed here in our brook.
“And then the daughter disappeared,” Caroline said solemnly. “The queen believes the girl’s spirit is hidden inside the spoon. She searches, but she can’t find it. The queen vows to search forever. Until her dying day.”
We gazed into the tarnished silver of the great spoon’s bowl and saw the barest dull reflection of our own faces staring back.
* * *
IT WAS THE second summer of the Pause when our game ended. This was when we first met Nathan Duffy. One morning we tramped down the hill and heard splashing, giggles, whoops. We emerged from the woods to see a gaggle of kids, each brown from the sun and shaggy-haired, different heights and genders but all variations on the same essential theme. Nathan was one of six siblings, looked after during the summers by their babysitter, Angela, who long ago had come to the pond when she was a kid. Now Angela spread out a flowered king sheet and sat smack in the middle with a crossword as the Duffy siblings swam, played, ate, and fought around her. Nathan was middle of the pack—two older brothers, three younger sisters—and the quietest. I hadn’t even noticed him until later that day when he appeared beside our blanket.
Nathan crouched on his haunches in the grass and asked Caroline about her book.
“Is that Nancy Drew?” he said. “Do you read the Hardy Boys, too? I like The Tower Treasure best.” It was overcast that day, a dull, heavy sky. Thunder was coming, rain too.
Caroline lifted her eyes from the book and studied Nathan. They were both long-legged and skinny, both dirty blond, both bronzed and squint-eyed in the sun. Nathan wore gold glasses that matched his hair. His gaze was careful and serious.
During the Pause, Caroline was the one who missed our parents the most. She cried easily, silently, at the kitchen table while we ate breakfast or later in the living room when we played Monopoly, even if she was winning. Her bad dreams raged for nights, then subsided, then took hold again without any apparent pattern or cause. She’d awake screaming and crying, and none of us could comfort her, not even Renee.
Now she coolly returned Nathan’s gaze and shrugged her shoulders. “Hardy Boys are okay,” she replied. “But Nancy is braver.”
Nathan tilted his head, considering. With his long, careful fingers, he picked at the edge of our quilt and at a collection of small, warm pebbles I had gathered and placed on a leaf.
“Wanna swim?” he said suddenly. He moved quick as a darting minnow, jumping away from us, running along the bank, from one side of the pond to the other, in and out of the water, atop the dam (although it was slippery and Angela yelled at him to come off), up a tree and down. At last he returned to Caroline. He shook his wet head at her, and she angrily slammed her book shut and stalked off to sit on the sand. But she looked back at him. I saw the glance, her interest in this pale, quick boy clear on her face.
It wasn’t long before we learned all about Nathan. He had a mother named Jeanette, a father named Cyrus, and five siblings who became known to us as a single unit: DouglasTerryMaddyEmilyJen. We called them the Goats, because their last name was Duffy, which reminded us of the Billy Goats Gruff from the fairy tale, and also because there was something goatlike about them, with their long, curious faces and all that shaggy hair. Each of them appeared strong-willed, utterly confident, fighting loudly with the others over questions of Eggo preparation and volcanic eruptions and Michael Jackson song lyrics.
The day after we first met Nathan Duffy, we met Ace McAllister. Ace came crashing down the path to the pond wearing head-to-toe camouflage and holding a BB gun.
“Bang, bang, bang!” he yelled, startling us from our games and books.
“That’s Ace,” Nathan declared without emotion as Ace pretended to shoot him again and again.
Ace was short and thick in the torso, with heavy limbs and broad features. He had an abundance of dark, shiny hair that fell into his eyes. He and Nathan were not friends, but they were neighbors and only one year apart in age, and so their mothers had thrust them together since their earliest days of playground visits and birthday parties.
“Angela, gotcha!” Ace yelled, and directed his attention toward the babysitter. Angela flapped a hand at him but did not lift her eyes from her magazine. Once she’d been his babysitter, too, and brought him on summer afternoons to the pond, but she’d quit to work for the Duffys. Now Ace’s parents left him alone with a ten-dollar bill, a house key, and instructions to keep out of trouble.
Within days it became clear that Ace was the wildest of us all. He cannonballed off the dam into the pond and whooped so loudly that even Nathan’s big brother Terry told him to quiet down. Nathan was in sixth grade, Ace in fifth at a private day school in Greenwich called Pierpont Academy. We all went to public school, and the idea of Pierpont—with its uniforms and lacrosse fields—struck me as impressively mature and intellectual, but Ace went there only because his parents had money and they didn’t know what else to do with him. He boasted that he’d been kicked out of a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire, suspended at public school, and Pierpont Academy was the only place that would take him. He talked of fights won, beers drunk, cigarettes smoked. We doubted the truth of these claims but listened nonetheless to the stories. He often brought his BB gun to the pond, or a loud boom box he claimed to have stolen. He captured frogs and crickets and once a small green garter snake, keeping each for a spell in a shoe box. I suspected he longed to poke these animals, or hurt them, but he didn’t dare with us there.
When Ace learned that Joe played baseball, he began to treat him with more interest and more aggression. He began to say things like, “Look, here comes Joe DiMaaaaggio,” drawing out the ah as a croak. But there was also the slightest hint of deference, of awe. Joe was one year younger than Ace but taller, stronger, with an athlete’s calm.
Joe regarded Ace cautiously. They were friendly, but, I believed at the time, they would never be friends. Ace was an unwanted but unavoidable summer accessory, and we accepted him as we accepted the humidity and the mosquitoes, with only mild complaint.
The six of us—me and Joe, Nathan and Ace, Caroline and Renee—formed a gang of sorts. We weren’t always together, not every day, but most days we swam at the pond or played Twenty Questions on the grass or watched TV at Nathan’s house while the Goats milled around and slammed doors and talked on the phone in loud, amused voices. In the early evening, once the sun began to drop, we would play baseball at the park. We always handicapped Joe—Only your left hand! No mitt! Close your eyes!—because otherwise the games were short and humiliating. We also wanted to see what Joe could do, and so we pushed him to perform in wilder, more ridiculous scenarios. He did so gamely, laughing, always succeeding at the trials we set. Sometimes we sat in the stands and watched as Ace pitched ball after ball and Joe hit each long and high, a dreamy, lazy smile on his face. An effortless look, as though hitting the ball like that required only the smallest piece of himself.
“Your brother will be famous,” Nathan said to me one afternoon in his careful, considered way. “He’s already like a superstar.”
I don’t remember replying. I might have said, Of course. I might have simply shrugged. It seemed so self-evident, there was no need for a reply. Joe was already a superstar. Back then did he know what people expected of him? At the field the look on his face was always dreamy, his movements casual, but it must have cost him to play like that. To give us the spectacle we craved.
* * *
IN THE LAST week of the summer of 1983, Joe and Ace fought. It was because of me, or rather what had been done to me. It was about, of all things, my rabbit, Celeste.
“You live in that gray house, right?” Ace asked me one afternoon. We’d been at the pond all day, and my skin was itchy and sticky from swimming and drying in the sun and swimming again. I felt slightly bored, definitely hungry, wondering what Renee would make us for dinner and whether the book I’d dropped accidentally into the water would dry in time for me to finish it tonight. I was six years old, chubby, pink-faced, and never without a book in hand. Recently I had started to keep lists of words in the black-and-white composition notebooks Renee used for school. They were not poems, not yet, merely catalogs of my feelings and sensations, things I had seen, events that had transpired.
Green, gold, fish, water, sun, grass, sisters, brother, swimming, free, warm, soft.
Ace looked at me now with intense interest. “The gray house?” he prodded.
I looked up from my notebook and nodded.
“Do you have a pet rabbit?”
I put down my pencil and closed the book. “She ran away,” I explained, “to be with her brothers and sisters.”
Ace began to laugh, great big peals. He held his stomach for effect and rolled over onto his back.
“Run away?” he said. “She didn’t run away. I took that rabbit.”
“But why?” I asked. I wasn’t angry yet, only confused.
“She was a mighty fine rabbit. Mighty. Fine.” Ace licked his lips with a slurping sound.
“Oh, stop it, Ace,” Nathan called. He was swimming, treading water as he listened. “Don’t tease Fiona.”
“I’m not teasing! I’m just telling the truth! ‘Don’t tease the girls, Ace. Don’t tell lies. Be a good boy like me.’” The last he said in a mocking, high voice. Nathan didn’t respond. He ducked his head beneath the water.
“You didn’t,” I said to Ace. “You did not.”
“I didn’t eat her, no. I’m just kidding. What I did was I took her over to the railroad tracks, down the other side of the hill, and played with her a little. I just left her there. On the tracks, I mean.”
Brown freckles marked the high point of Ace’s cheeks. They seemed to darken as he spoke.
“I tried to tie her to the track, put a rope around her leg,” he said. “I mean, so I could go back for her, bring her back to your house, but I think she must have gotten away. There was only a little bit of fur when I went to find her. Just a teeny scrap.”
My face grew hot, a pressure rose behind my eyes. I believed that Ace was lying, that he wanted to see me cry, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I couldn’t help myself. I remembered Celeste and her clean fur, her twitching triangular nose.
Soft, lovely, new, alone.
Joe saw me crying. “What did you do to her?” he called across the grass to Ace. Joe’s voice was sharp. He was playing solitaire, the cards spread in front of him, half a deck still in his hands.
I wanted to say, I’m fine, Joe, but the words wouldn’t come. The humid air moved thickly through my lungs. And then Ace answered for me. He repeated everything he’d told me about Celeste and the train tracks. Joe’s face went still as Ace spoke. I remembered how Joe had loved the rabbit, too.
“You’re lying,” he said to Ace.
“I’m not,” Ace answered. Now everyone was listening. Renee had stayed home that day to bake a pie from the raspberries that grew like weeds in the alley behind our house, but the rest of us were there: me, Caroline, Nathan, and two of the Goats. At the pond the lack of parental oversight made us wild in one way but conservative in another. We did not swear or fight with one another. We avoided conflict. Only Ace seemed intent on something more destructive. This would be true his entire life.
Ace was shorter than Joe, but heavier and thicker. He played no sports; he seemed to exist only on cans of Orange Crush and cellophane packages of Hostess doughnuts he would eat in three bites, powdered sugar ghosting his mouth.
“What are you going to do?” Ace said. “Huh, Joe? Big strong Joe?”
We watched Joe: he was very tan, which made his eyes more blue and his hair more gold than brown. All the swimming and hiking up and down the hill had melted away his baby fat. You could see in Joe now the beginning of his broad, muscular shoulders, the athlete’s chest and stomach that years later he would rub with baby oil as a lifeguard at the Bexley rec center’s pool, surrounded always by a cadre of high-school girls who looked like women.
But today he was still a boy. At his eyebrow one slender muscle twitched.
Joe did what I remembered instantly Noni doing from before the Pause, before our father’s death, when she was still our mother and engaged in the task of taking care of us. Joe counted down.
“If you don’t take it back in five seconds,” Joe said, “you’ll be sorry.” He swallowed and flicked his cowlick back from his eyes. “Five. Four. Three. Two—”
Before Joe could finish, Ace turned and ran. His legs carried him up away from the bank and around to the slippery top of the dam where the water rushed over concrete gummed with green algae. He pranced along the top. “Come and get me, Joe,” he said.
Joe didn’t go to the top of the dam. None of us did. Renee told us it was too dangerous, we could fall, and we believed her. We all watched Ace jump on one leg, then the other, taunting Joe, daring him. Ace’s feet were wrapped in silver as the water rushed over them.
“Come on, Joe,” he said. “You pussy.”
And then Ace slipped. One foot dropped over the far side of the dam. He landed heavily on a knee, which cracked with a sickening sound just before he slid off. For an instant Ace’s hands hung grasping onto the lip, water pushing into his face, but the force of it was too strong and the hands disappeared.
This happened so quickly that we barely registered his absence. Ace was there on the dam, and then he was gone. The still, hot air remained the same, the sound of rushing water, the buzz of a sapphire-blue dragonfly that started and stopped across the surface of the pond. It seemed possible that Ace would return, pop up again, that the thrust of those seconds would unfurl and bring us back to the start. But of course that can never happen.
Ace fell, and no one spoke, and then Joe ran up the path and into the woods surrounding the pond and down the hill on the other side. I heard the crash of underbrush, the thud of his feet. The drop on the other side of the dam was the distance of a three-story building to the ground. The pool into which the water fell was dark, rocky along the edges, and who knew how deep? The pool swiftly became a thin, roiling stream bordered by thick undergrowth and tall, shaggy trees. For us the pond marked the edge of our world. Beyond the pond, below the dam, stretched an unknown wilderness.
Joe called for Ace, his voice growing weaker as he traveled farther into the woods. Nathan began to follow Joe, and I stood, ready to join them, but Nathan told me harshly to sit down. “Joe and I can do it,” he said. “Girls stay here.” And then he, too, was gone, bounding into the brush.
Five hours after Ace fell from the dam, Joe stepped through the door of the gray house. He was sweaty, feet muddy, face and hands scratched from branches and brambles. Ace was fine, he told us, fished from the stream by Joe about half a mile from the pond. He’d swallowed some water, Joe said, and had been struggling when Joe found him.
“Was he drowned?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Joe said. “He puked up half the pond once I pulled him out.” Joe was smiling, but his face was tight and nervous.
Ace’s ankle had twisted in the fall, the knee was grazed raw and swollen, but he was able to walk with Joe and Nathan half carrying him back up to the road and to his house. Only Ace’s mother had been home, Joe reported, a woman none of us had ever met. She was tall and skinny, and she didn’t look like Ace one bit. She was sitting on a flowered couch and smoking a cigarette when they pushed open the front door. Ace’s house looked shiny on the inside, and Joe had been afraid to touch anything or even to place his feet on the pale carpet and so they’d hovered half in, half out of the door, holding Ace.
Ace’s mother blew smoke from her nostrils like a dragon before asking, “What happened this time?”
Joe and Nathan deposited Ace onto the couch and then waited as Ace’s mother poked and prodded at the ankle.
“Just a sprain,” she declared, and gave Ace a bag of frozen peas and the TV remote control. She pulled two crisp dollar bills from her wallet, handed one to Joe, one to Nathan, and said, “Thank you for bringing him home. Run along now.” So they did.
It was another week before we saw Ace again. One morning he returned to the pond with a slight limp, his left ankle wrapped in a putty-colored bandage, the laces of his left sneaker loose. He sat beside me on a towel.
“Mom says I can’t go swimming for another week,” Ace told me. He pulled a deck of cards from his pocket. “Rummy?” he asked.
Soon it became clear that Ace had changed. The challenge that he’d worn like a badge was gone. The bite of aggression between Ace and Joe evaporated. In its place was a new, cautious friendship. Joe treated Ace with kindness and some pity, almost as though he were a much younger child. Ace followed Joe, he courted him with a sort of stifled awe. Finally Ace understood, I thought, that Joe was special.
This continued for the rest of the summer, until we arrived back at our different schools, each of us locked in our own grade and class and routine. Sometimes during the winter, I’d catch a glimpse of Ace at the grocery store with his mother or gliding through town in the blue BMW his father drove, sleek and shiny as a slow-moving bullet. Always Ace looked small and shrunken beside his parents, who were both tall, graceful people. Later I understood how every day Ace disappointed his parents simply because of who he was: unambitious, easily distracted, petty-minded. Even then I recognized the signs of that disappointment: the way his mother did not look directly at her son. The way his father walked a pace in front. I found myself feeling sorry for Ace. I found myself unable to recall the Ace that once had seemed like a threat.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_bb87b53d-fd23-5071-b126-370a265128c1)
THE PAUSE COULD not go on forever. We knew this. There were dangers. We were children alone, the four of us, without protection or instruction, and while Renee played the part of quasi mother, she buckled under the weight. Unsustainable, I wrote later. Unsupportable, hazardous, perilous, unsafe.
The year that Renee turned thirteen, she grew high, round nubs on her chest and hair that went lank and greasy just days after her bath. She exuded a musty, earthy smell and was inhabited by a new atmosphere of churning activity like a spirit possessed. We had all seen the movie Poltergeist, and I thought that this was the only explanation for my sister: an otherworldly occupation.
One night Renee was late coming home. After cross-country practice, she always caught the late bus at five thirty, but it was now six fifty and dark, and still no sign of her. Joe and Caroline and I made ourselves cheese sandwiches for dinner and chewed silently on the couch, plates on our laps, watching the door. Twice Joe said he should call the school, but he hadn’t, not yet.
“What if she doesn’t come back?” Caroline said. She was ten years old and afraid of spiders, the kitchen garbage disposal, and the grrr sound Joe made only to frighten her. Nightmares still plagued Caroline and would well into her twenties.
I was undisturbed by Renee’s mysterious absence. Life without Renee was simply impossible. She made charts that listed our chores, homework, Joe’s baseball schedule, Caroline’s flute concerts, her own cross-country practices and meets. Renee ensured that we wore clean clothes to school, brushed our teeth, brushed our hair, caught the school bus, did our homework. Renee relit the pilot light on the furnace when it sputtered out. She forged Noni’s signature on checks and permission slips. She cooked spaghetti and frozen peas and pancakes from the Bisquick box. We had learned to exist without our mother, but we could not exist without Renee.
“Maybe,” Caroline said, “we should wake up Noni.” We hadn’t seen our mother today. We hadn’t seen her yesterday either.
“No,” said Joe. “I’ll go find Renee.” I saw in him the same air of responsibility, of taking charge, that he’d worn when Ace fell off the dam.
“I want to come,” I said.
Joe crouched down to look me in the eye. “Fiona, it’s better if I go alone. I’ll go faster. And you need to keep Caroline company. Keep her safe.”
I expected Caroline to dispute this, but she only nodded. “Yes, Fiona, stay with me. Please.” Caroline’s eyes were going red, her voice shook.
And so I stayed as Joe disappeared out the door, into the night. Caroline and I sat on the couch to wait. We did not talk or turn on the TV; we finished our sandwiches and listened intently for a sound, any sound, to come from Noni’s room.
Forty-five minutes passed, perhaps an hour, and at last the front door opened and Renee and Joe, both breathless and agitated, tumbled inside. Relief flooded me, a rush I had not known I was waiting for. Caroline burst into tears.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where were you?”
Renee pulled roughly at the curtains, clicked the lights off, and chased us all into the kitchen at the back of the house. Her manner was short and urgent. On her left cheek, there was a bloodied scrape, the skin swollen, and all at once, for the first time that night, I felt afraid.
“Sit down,” she ordered, and we sat at the kitchen table.
A car had been parked at the bus stop, Renee told us, a brown car with a man in the driver’s seat. An elbow out the window, sunglasses although it was dusk, the sun nearly gone.
“Baby,” he called to her. “I’ve seen you. Want a ride?”
It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop to our house. Renee did not want a ride, not from this man, and she told him so, but he began to follow her, the car inching along the road. No other cars passed, and Renee felt cold and very weak.
“I didn’t think I could run fast enough,” she said. Renee, who was a natural runner, whose thighs were the circumference of my arm, who galloped along the rocky cross-country trail in meet after meet, winning medal after medal, the child of a mountain goat and a gazelle. She had never before said there was a race she couldn’t win.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she continued. “I was afraid he would follow me here, so I went down another street and then another, and then he stopped the car behind me, and I ran and hid in the Hunters’ backyard. There was a swing set with a slide—like in the yellow house, remember? I hid under the slide until I heard Joe calling for me.”
Joe had wandered the neighborhood, walking in circles away from our house, he told us, calling Renee’s name.
“But what about your cheek?” I asked. “Who hurt you?”
Renee gingerly touched the spot on her face as though discovering it for the first time. “Oh. I … um …”
“She scraped it on the slide,” said Joe. “She ran out so quickly she didn’t duck low enough. So she hit it.”
Renee nodded tentatively, then with more force. “Yes, that’s it,” she murmured, again touching her face. “The slide.”
The man who called Renee “baby” never returned. It was an isolated incident, but it infected us in a way I didn’t understand until much later. Renee stopped taking the late bus and would now wait until her coach was finished for the night and could drive her home. Caroline’s nightmares doubled in frequency and ferocity. I stopped roaming the neighborhood as freely as I once had. Perhaps this was for the best—a check on our behavior, a lean toward safety—but I remember it only as a chill up my spine, a dampness to my palms. The idea that someone was watching us. That we were unsafe.
The incident made us all feel vulnerable, although in different ways. For Joe it was fear of what might happen to us, his sisters. But for us, Joe’s sisters, it was fear for ourselves. The man might come again for Renee or for me or for Caroline, but he would not come for Joe. Only girls remained at the mercy of men with bad intentions. Men in cars that were brown or red or gray, who wore sunglasses or didn’t, who were young or old, white or black, strangers or known to us.
This fear uncovered the tenuousness of our position during the Pause. The cracks became evident, and I watched them widen. Caroline and Joe began to fight frequently, Renee to cry without reason, to serve us dinner with shaking hands. Joe spent more time with his friends, girls in particular. He was the tallest boy in fifth grade, and girls took a spirited, wholesome interest in him as though he were a fuzzy stuffed animal in need of cuddling. Kim, Ashley, Shannon, Julie. I remember their ponytails and squeaky Keds and sticker collections in hard-backed photo albums with plastic pages. In school they would tease Joe gently and give him the Oreos and juice boxes from their lunches. They refilled his water bottle at baseball practice. They told their mothers that their friend Joe needed a ride to the movies, or a new pencil case, or construction paper for the science report about mammals, and could they please help? Joe accepted their attentions. He began to spend more time with these girls, away from the house and me.
In my notebook I wrote the words dust, dirty, drafty, alone, Gilligan, cold, island, tv, shipwrecked.
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER the man followed Renee, Joe took me to the old yellow house. It was only after the accident that I placed the two events together, not in the way of cause and effect but a more amorphous push-pull. A sense of growing unease. A secret interior turmoil finding its way into the open air.
The day we walked back to our old neighborhood was beautiful: sunshine and crisp air, clear sky, the rustle of flaming leaves underfoot. Autumn in full bloom. New people lived at the yellow house, a family with boys and girls, apparently. Joe and I stood for a spell on the sidewalk and surveyed the bikes, footballs, Frisbees and hula hoops that lay abandoned across the front lawn.
“There’s no car,” Joe said. He was holding my hand. “They must not be home.”
“But what about all this stuff?” I replied.
Joe shrugged. “Let’s go check.”
He led me around to the back door—down the side alley, past the garbage bins, turn left, cut across the lawn, over the patio, and there, the back door painted a bright white. I knew that door so well. It took my breath away to see it again.
“Maybe we could go in and look around,” Joe said.
“But, Joe …” I protested, though weakly. I wanted to go inside, too. I liked the idea of freely examining other people’s things, taking time to sort through the mother’s makeup bag, to check the Scrabble game for marked-up score sheets. Maybe I would find a journal, a notebook like the one I kept, filled with the secret thoughts of another girl. The possibility gave me a shiver of delight.
I followed Joe as he pushed open the back door and called “Hello! Hello!” We stood in the kitchen, our old kitchen, and listened to the quiet ticking of the clock, the silent settling of the house. The room looked the same, different only in small, frivolous ways. A new round table. Photos of unfamiliar faces pegged to the fridge. The smell was different, too, heavier than I remembered it, and more chemical.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Joe said.
Slowly we climbed the creaking steps. I went immediately to my bedroom but paused in the doorway. Unlike the kitchen, this room was fundamentally changed: bed, curtains, stuffed animals, all different, and, strangest of all, in a corner stood a bubbling fish tank that glowed blue. I saw no board games, no tantalizing notebooks. I stepped inside my old room and watched the fish dart in a mindless dance. They were the same size as the minnows from the pond, but these fish were brightly colored with stripes and spots, and they moved faster, with less purpose. There was nothing for these fish to do, nowhere for them to go. They were trapped.
“Fiona!” Joe called from the hall. “Fiona! Come here!”
I found him standing in what had been our parents’ bedroom. This room, too, was unrecognizable, with glossy furniture set in odd places and a large abstract painting on the wall.
“I thought he’d be here,” Joe said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Dad. We’re looking for Dad. That’s why we’re here.”
“Dad?” I barely remembered our father. I thought of him rarely and only with reference to Noni and all that she’d endured. “Joe, are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure,” he whispered fiercely. “Now, shhh. I know he’ll come.”
The yearning in Joe’s voice shattered the still air into a million pieces. It shocked me into a stunned silence.
And so we waited, standing in the middle of a room that no longer belonged to our parents. The air became heavier, the walls moved inward. I could hear Joe’s labored breathing and the faint tick-tick of a clock from another room. The moments lengthened and spun like a carnival ride. I chewed the inside of my cheek and waited for Joe to be finished. Everything about this made me light-headed, vaguely nauseous. Back then I didn’t believe that we would ever see our father again.
Without warning I began to giggle. The silence, the discomfort, the ache in my knees, the outright strangeness of it all. I couldn’t contain myself any longer.
“Joe—ooooh—” I held up my arms and wiggled my fingers. “Look, I’m a ghost Joe! Look!”
I moved toward him with arms outstretched. On my brother’s face, I saw an immediate deflation and a flicker of shame.
“Yeah, a ghost,” Joe said gruffly, and laughed. “Got you, didn’t I?”
The slam of a car door startled us both. There were voices outside in the driveway, then footsteps at the front door. Joe grabbed my hand, and together we ran down the stairs and out the back. We were breathless and scared, both of us laughing as we made it through the side gate and across our old neighbors’ lawns and eventually home to the gray house.
I never told anyone about this episode, although later I came to see it as a marker of the end of the Pause. Certain things had become unsustainable. Certain pressures threatened to explode. Renee’s responsibilities, Caroline’s nightmares, Joe and his … I didn’t know what to call it. His lack. The way he had everything and nothing. The way he smiled and flicked back his cowlick and said everything that everyone wanted to hear, and yet it seemed that his manner began outside himself, externally, with the wishes of others who wanted something from him. Coach Marty, Noni, the team, his friends, his teachers, the girls. Even us, his sisters.
What did Joe want for himself? I never knew. It was only years later, after the accident, that I realized I had never thought to ask.
* * *
AFTER THE EPISODE with Renee, it was ironic that a man in a car at last brought us salvation. The Pause ended because a man in a car slowed and stopped.
It was Renee, of course, who saw to it that Joe attended every baseball practice and every game. This was Joe’s fourth year of Little League. His progress in the sport was a rare orchid that we tended with careful watering, pruning, reverence. “Tell your mother Joe is doing great,” Coach Marty would say to Renee. “Tell her he’s one in a million.”
Twice weekly the four of us walked from home to the Bexley playing field. The route consisted of one mile of calm, tree-lined residential streets followed by one and a half miles of flat, fast Route 9, a four-lane highway running through empty fields of tall, yellowed grass and splintered old fences, the occasional neglected house, and one you-pump gas station. There was no sidewalk, so we walked in the breakdown lane or in the grass. Surely we looked curious to passing cars: Renee striding forward with her solid, sure-footed step; Joe pristine in his baseball gear, bat slung over a shoulder; me with curly hair crazy in the wind, skipping beside Joe to keep up; Caroline wearing a long skirt, singing to herself, lagging behind. The trip took over an hour.
One morning a car slowed beside us. A man leaned over to peer through the open passenger window. It was Coach Marty.
“What are you kids doing?” he asked. “Joe Skinner, is that you?”
“We’re on our way to practice,” Renee answered, still walking. “I’m taking Joe to the field.”
Coach Marty’s car inched along beside us as he considered this answer. He looked at me chewing a wad of bubble gum too big for my mouth, and then he pulled to the side of the road just ahead.
“I’ll take you,” he said. “Get in.”
Renee hesitated. Later we would come to know Marty Roach very well, but on that morning he was only Joe’s coach, the funny man with the dark mustache whom we glimpsed from afar on the field.
“We’re good at walking,” Renee said carefully. “We do it every week.”
It was a cold spring day, and the wind whistled along the road and the grassy fields and reached through our thin coats. We were all shivering, hands in pockets. Caroline’s long hair whipped around her face.
“Please, Renee,” said Caroline. “Let’s go with him.” There were dark half-moons beneath her eyes. Her tolerance for this life had reached its limits.
Renee looked at the road, she looked at Joe, who nodded, and then she said to Marty, “Okay.”
Marty’s car smelled of mint and tobacco, not cigarettes but the ripe, woody scent of pulp tobacco, and it seemed to me a cozy place, like a room with a fireplace in the days before Christmas. Years later I would date a much older man who smoked a pipe—pure affect, we didn’t date for long—but the first time he took the pipe out and lit it, I returned again to the back of that car. Coach Marty’s huge, meaty hands on the wheel, the back of his head a white dome striped with the dark brown of his comb-over. Gray vinyl seats, a pull-down armrest in the center that he pushed up to accommodate us, releasing a grainy silt that he wiped away with the back of his hand onto the floor of the car.
“There you go,” he said, and the four of us packed thigh to thigh into the back seat.
Some say there are no secrets in small towns, but I believe this to be false. There were people in Bexley who knew about Noni—I’m sure of it—but they kept the matter to themselves. Noni was a secret; Noni was something no one discussed. Back then there was no “reply all” or neighborhood message board. You had to pick up the phone and hope that the person to whom you wished to speak would answer. You had to walk out your front door and start up your car and drive to the Skinners’ new house and knock on the front door and hope that Antonia Skinner would not send you immediately away, as she did to Mrs. Lipton when she tried to drop off a tin of cookies that first Christmas.
The Skinner children went to school. We were fed. It was a difficult time—of course it was, everyone understood that. No one wanted to intrude. We were left alone.
Only Coach Marty did not leave us alone. Maybe it was the week after that first ride to the field, or the next month, or next season. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that one day Marty Roach came home with us.
That night there was a baseball game, a midseason corker between the Mavericks and the Eagles from neighboring Milford. Joe scored three runs, committed no errors, caught a high fly ball to close out the sixth inning, and you could see the hope drain from the faces of those Milford boys. The sun lingered in the sky after the game, bright pinks and orange, and in the air there was a buzzy warmth. My hands were sticky from melted ice cream. Joe’s purple-and-green uniform looked regal in the dying light, a worn-out king touched with glitter and dirt.
After the game Marty drove us home. I remember standing with him at our front door, which was painted the same dingy gray as the rest of the house. Our screen was torn, broken long ago during a game of pirates between me and Joe. The corner hung down, nearly touching the ground.
Renee used her key to let us in. She did not hesitate. She threw open the door as if to say, Here it is. Look and tell me, is this okay?
Coach Marty stood in the middle of the living room—a mess of unpacked boxes and dirty dishes, games, forts, discarded clothing, a trail of checkers I had laid days ago for a lost stuffed bear—and called for our mother.
“Mrs. Skinner? Mrs. Skinner? Antonia?”
No answer. And so Renee yelled, “Noni! Noni, come here!”
After a spell we heard a creak of floorboards. Noni emerged at the end of the hall in her bathrobe, which was dirty, her long hair wild around her head, and in that moment we saw her anew. Her face was indoor pale, her feet bare. I noticed the musty stench of the house, of unwashed floors and dirty dishes, damp towels, dusty corners. What before had been only Noni resting, always resting, now appeared to me terrible.
Our mother looked at Marty and said, “Oh. Hello.”
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER this, our Aunt Claudia arrived from Cleveland. She was childless, our father’s much-older sister whom we had met only once before at his funeral. She had tightly curled gray hair that sat like a bathing cap on her head and a long, horsey face. Claudia brought with her one pink suitcase and an air of rigorous competence. Our mother left the house; our mother returned; the house became clean; we became clean. Our mother left the house again, only this time she wore a neat blue skirt suit and lipstick colored a race-car red. Claudia told us that Noni was looking for a job, and about time, too.
“You’ve got to get on with things,” Claudia said as we watched Noni drive away. “Too much laying around isn’t good for anyone. Remember that. Keeping busy is the best defense against feeling sad. It’s simple, but it’s true.”
Aunt Claudia was proof of this lesson. She was the least sad and most busy person I had ever met. She swirled around our house with a cloth and a spray bottle like a bird looking for an exit, and everything she bumped into became clean, tidy, sparkling. Back home Aunt Claudia worked as a teller at a bank in North Royalton, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. She described for us the intricate details of her job, the piles of twenties wrapped in special paper, the safe as big as a room, the secret slots of the safe-deposit boxes where people placed the oddest things.
“Once a man came in and rented one for a pair of shoes, ladies’ shoes,” she told us. “Now, why would anyone do such a thing?”
For four weeks Claudia cooked large, well-balanced meals that we ate until our stomachs groaned; she cycled load after load of dirty clothes through the washer and dryer; she read aloud books we had read before, but still we listened; she bought us art supplies, and we colored diligently the pictures of forest animals and trees, though we were far too old for coloring books.
I wrote muscle, broom, thick, bristle, warm, squeak, soap, gravy, meat, full.
What we liked best of all was Claudia telling stories about our father when he was a boy: his extreme fear of ants, his favorite food (meatballs), the operation he had when he was ten to fix the knuckle of his right thumb (trigger thumb, she called it). When she recounted these episodes, her eyes would become glassy and she’d dab at them with a tissue she pulled from a small plastic pack that accompanied her everywhere.
One day we were eating lunch when Aunt Claudia said, “Joe, you look just like your father.” She paused to blow her nose into a tissue. “You’re the man of the family now. Don’t you forget it.”
We had never before considered the word man with reference to Joe. When Claudia said this, we all turned toward him. We were eating pink boiled hot dogs with white buns that disappeared like cotton candy in your mouth. Noni was out on another interview.
Suddenly Joe seemed altered. He felt it, too. He stiffened his shoulders, brought up his puffy chest. “I’m the man of the family,” he repeated, and I giggled because it struck me as both absurd and momentous. Joe was ten years old. A man.
Although we basked in Claudia’s attentions and listened avidly to her stories, inside we remained watchful. There was so much information, so much nutrition and stimulation that we barely spoke during the month that she stayed with us. We did everything she told us to do. We did not fight or talk back or make large messes because we were too exhausted by her capable, forceful presence. But secretly each of us wondered: what will happen when Aunt Claudia leaves?
On her last night, Aunt Claudia took us all to the International House of Pancakes. We were celebrating Noni’s new job as a receptionist at Dr. Hart’s dental practice across town. Dr. Hart, our father’s old competitor, had been looking for someone like our mother, someone who knew the ins and outs of the business, the peculiar dental vocabulary, the complexities of a dentist’s life.
Noni had cut her hair short with little wings on the sides like Billie Jean King, and it gave me a shock of strangeness to see her without a mass of dark curls. As she chewed her blueberry pancakes, her hand stole up to her neck to finger the sharp line where hair met skin.
“Thank you, Claudia, for taking such good care of us,” Noni said, and raised her glass of orange juice. We all clinked and called “Cheers!”
“Of course,” Claudia answered. “I only wish I’d come sooner. I just thought you needed some space, Antonia. That was really it.”
Noni only nodded.
“But I didn’t realize both your parents were dead. And no siblings. I hadn’t realized you were so alone, Antonia. Really, I hadn’t.”
“It’s okay. We’re fine now. Right, kids?” Noni looked around the table at each of us. Our fingers were sticky from maple syrup, our teeth and blood tingly with sugar. We had eaten stacks of pancakes, and yet our stomachs still felt empty. Were we fine? Yes. One by one we returned Noni’s gaze and nodded. Even Renee nodded. Yes, we said. We are all fine.
“Good,” Noni said. “Good.” She smiled a firm little smile.
And that was how it happened: we forgave our mother. We forgave Noni not because she was all we had, although this was true, but because we shared her. She belonged to the four of us, and for one not to forgive her meant that the others couldn’t either, and none of us was willing to shoulder the burden of that decision. None of us could bear to take Noni away from the others again.
* * *
AFTER AUNT CLAUDIA left, Noni returned with a vengeance. She began to call herself a feminist and to call us, her daughters, feminists, too. She bought books by Gloria Steinem and bell hooks and Germaine Greer that she read aloud at the dinner table. The year was 1984.
“Better late than never,” Noni said.
Only a few of my friends’ mothers worked. One was a professor at the University of Connecticut who wore half-glasses on a string of purple beads around her neck. Another, a family lawyer who rented an office in Bexley with her name printed in gold on the window. But for the most part, the mothers remained at home and oversaw play dates and drove us to the movies and lurked in the kitchen, where they banged pots and spread peanut butter onto saltine crackers for us to eat after school. While our father was alive, Noni had been this kind of mother. But after she began working for Dr. Hart, Noni changed. She would describe for us her day at Dr. Hart’s office, the patients and their troublesome dental quandaries, the new system of color-coded file notes, the car accident just in front of the building that closed the street for hours. We saw in these stories a Noni who enjoyed her life away from us. This life of drama and intrigue that existed far from the confines of the gray house and us, her children.
When I was in third grade, I memorized for the class Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Applicant,” which traumatized my poor teacher, Miss Adelaide. (“A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk!”) Fourth grade, I dressed as Gloria Steinem for Halloween and spent the entire night explaining the significance of my bell-bottoms and turtleneck. Fifth grade, Noni volunteered to assist in my puberty and health class, and I walked through the class handing out tampons and pads in purple plastic wrappers.
Noni regretted the Pause, she told us. She wanted to make it up to us, all those lost days while she rested. The missed baseball games and teacher conferences and Caroline’s flute concerts and Renee’s cross-country meets and dinners and bedtimes and love.
“I am so sorry,” she would say. “I am so, so sorry. I should have gotten some help. Thank goodness nothing horrible happened.”
We would look at one another and say nothing about the pond, or Ace’s accident, or the man who followed Renee from the bus stop. In fact, we told Noni nothing about the Pause. Wordlessly we agreed that it was better to keep these events secret. We saw this as protecting ourselves from discipline but also as protection for Noni. We believed that she required care and shelter, that we must not subject her to upheaval or stress. Our mother was a temperamental furnace, a rescue dog once hostile but then subdued.
Now Noni explained her own early life and marriage as a cautionary tale, the period of her paralyzing grief the price we all paid for her foolishness. In these stories our father emerged as a dashing but hapless prince, one who lulled the good princess into a life of fat complacency deep within a castle of tricks and mirrors. When the prince disappeared, the castle was revealed to be only a cardboard shell; there was no coach, no footmen, only the pumpkin and the simpering mice. The shock of it all sent the princess into a deep sleep, until a good fairy godmother—not another prince, please, anything but that—roused her. And what did the princess see when she first awoke? What greeted her and stirred her fully from the glass chamber? Why, it was the mice, of course. They clambered atop the wreckage of the castle and reminded her that she could build it herself again.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_01754c8f-eab0-5305-b094-9f8fa258670e)
THE YEAR WAS 1989. The first George Bush was president. The previous month on TV, we’d watched as young men and women with outdated haircuts and funny clothes took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall. There was a sense of radical change and diminished threats. It was June, a beautiful warm night, and we were eating dinner with the back door open. Light-hungry moths fluttered against the screen. The night air smelled of dew and pavement.
“I don’t want you girls making the same mistakes I did,” Noni was saying. “I loved your father, I did, but you must not rely on a man. You must have your own money. Your own direction in life.”
By now we were accustomed to this line of discussion. We all nodded. We were eating pork chops, steamed broccoli, underdone rice that stuck between our teeth. Tonight Joe had played baseball, and he still wore his uniform, which was dirty across the front from when he slid into home in the seventh inning. A nick of mud marked his chin.
When Noni discussed feminism, Joe remained cautiously curious, wide-eyed, mostly silent. He was afraid to ask the wrong questions, ones that would invite our mother’s disdain, and also he sensed—correctly—that these discussions were not for his benefit. They were intended for us, the girls. Noni believed that the world was harder on women than it was on men, particularly women without men, and you could become one of those in a heartbeat. Noni wanted us to be ready in the ways that she had not. Joe’s passage would be smooth, paved with the wishes of all those who loved and admired him and wanted only to see him succeed.
Renee and I listened avidly to our mother’s lectures, tonight and every night. We nodded and used words like patriarchy and privilege and gender. Shortly after the end of the Pause, Renee had announced that she would become a doctor, and now all her efforts pointed to this goal. AP chemistry, biology, and calculus; her part-time job at the lab in New Haven; her dominance on the Bexley High cross-country team.
Only Caroline, at sixteen, yawned or examined her fingernails or tried, occasionally, to dispute Noni’s lessons.
“But what if we want to be married?” Caroline asked tonight. “What if we want other people?” Caroline’s hair fell long across her back and was streaked a whitish blond from the Sun In she used every morning with the blow dryer. We knew that she was thinking of Nathan Duffy and the Goats, who now called Caroline an honorary Duffy. In the afternoons Nathan would ride his bike slowly past our house and leave on the front steps odd little gifts: one silver stick of dusty Juicy Fruit, a silky brown horse chestnut big as a child’s fist, a lone pink carnation frilly as a tutu.
Noni answered Caroline’s question in the abstract. Even if she knew that the front-door gifts were for Caroline, she believed them irrelevant.
“Fine. Have other people,” Noni said. “But remember that they can be gone—poof! In an instant. Gone. So be prepared.”
This answer did not satisfy Caroline, who shifted and fidgeted on her chair. She blinked rapidly, her entire face reddened. She looked ready to weep.
“Oh, Caroline,” Noni said, and her voice softened. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you, really, I don’t. I just want to prepare you. So you won’t have to suffer. So you’ll have an easier, better time than I did.” She took hold of Caroline’s hand. We had finished eating our pork chops; on each of our plates lay a ragged, moon-shaped bone.
I wanted to believe that Noni’s suffering would not be our own, but her lessons seemed difficult to place within the context of our actual lives. Noni herself had sworn off dating and all men. For her, easier and better meant being alone. We watched The Love Boat every Saturday night with a mixture of delight and unease as the new cadre of attractive passengers flirted and kissed and paired off in the few short days of their tropical cruise. Was this supposed to happen? Caroline seemed to me the purest example of true love: worshipped by Nathan in a factual, fateful way. But even their relationship was dependent on parental whims and the absence of snow, which in the winters made the roof too precarious for Caroline to shimmy across and down to Nathan’s waiting car.
Caroline, still sniffling, turned to Noni. “Can I ask you a question?” she said gently.
“Of course,” Noni answered.
“I was wondering if I could have a slightly later curfew. Just on Saturdays. Or Fridays. One day.” Caroline’s eyes glistened, still wet from her tears. “Please,” she said.
I almost considered Nathan to be one of us, the Skinners. He loved the secret, rushing green of the pond; he knew about the Pause. I’d watched him grow just as I’d watched Joe, with his sudden height and the rough spots of beard that appeared in patches across his cheeks and neck like camouflage. But Noni knew nothing about that. To her, Nathan presented the same risks and liabilities as a stray dog brought home from the park. Would it bite? How long would it stay? She looked at him askance no matter how strenuously he tried to impress her.
“I’m going to study biology,” he had told Noni earlier that year, “be a university professor. I’m particularly interested in amphibians, frogs mostly. They’re disappearing. We need to save the frogs.”
It was the pond that had started this for Nathan. The baritone bullfrogs and the smaller ones, green as a new leaf. The plunk-splash sound as they leaped into the water. The bulging, lidless eyes, jellied, glistening.
But Noni had no use for frogs, or for Nathan. She had imposed a strict 11:00 P.M. curfew on Caroline, Renee, and me, although it was clear that only Caroline truly needed it. I was in sixth grade, twelve years old, and had nowhere to go, nothing outrageous to do. My most scandalous behavior involved sneaking into movies I hadn’t paid for at the cineplex with my friend Violet and eating far too much buttered popcorn.
At night Renee studied organic chemistry and compared medical schools. After one brief romantic fiasco last year involving our high school’s star wrestler, Brett Swenson, Renee now ignored boys altogether. She was too busy, she said, for distractions. She accepted Noni’s curfew with a shrug.
On this spring night, all of us together at the dinner table, Noni tilted her head and narrowed her eyes as she considered Caroline’s request for a later curfew.
“No,” she said. “We’ve been over this, Caroline. You have a curfew for a reason. I want you home.”
“But what about Joe?” Caroline asked.
It was true that Joe glided through the gauntlet of Noni’s discipline unmarked. Noni let him go to parties, date widely, deeply. And—this was the kicker for Caroline—stay out as late as he wanted. By the time Joe reached Bexley High School, he was a six-foot-four center fielder with the reach and charm of Willie Mays, the goofy grin and sleepy eyes of Joe DiMaggio. Girls swooned over him, boys followed him down the hallways and invited him to parties. Teachers indulged him whether they realized it or not. His dimples, the soft swell of his walk, the subtle crack in his voice, the tall golden promise of Joe Skinner. Parents congratulated Noni routinely, because they understood that just to have a son like Joe—simply to be the origin of whatever DNA soup produced a boy like that—was something to celebrate.
Noni said that Joe didn’t need a curfew. He was always up early for baseball practice anyhow. He hated alcohol. Hated the taste, hated the way it made him feel: out of control, bumbling, fuzzy. And think about the public service he performed as the reliable designated driver, the lone sober man among a battalion of high-school drunks. Why would Noni put others at risk just to make a point?
“But Joe is younger than me!” Caroline exclaimed.
Noni sighed. “Listen, if Joe needs one more hour to keep some other kid from driving home drunk and killing himself—Caroline, I’m going to let him do it.”
The rest of us remained silent. This scenario had played out before, always with the same result. Now, predictable as Christmas, Caroline would push away from the table, pound down the hall, and close her door with a wall-shaking slam.
But this time she didn’t.
“You play favorites,” Caroline accused. “You let Joe do whatever he wants, and you take it out on us.”
I inhaled sharply. Renee was looking down at the table. Joe’s eyes were closed, as though he could remove himself from this fight by refusing to acknowledge its escalation.
“That’s not true,” Noni said.
“Yes it is.” Caroline’s cheeks deepened to red. There was a recklessness in her voice. “And we have to go to every single baseball game. And you don’t care about his grades. And he gets to stay out late, and he’s sleeping with girls. Older girls. Did you know that? Jeanine Bobkin, Christi from Hamden High. That exchange student from Italy. And he’s only fifteen!”
“A lot more can happen to you, Caroline Skinner, when you stay out late.” Noni said this quietly, and it was the softness of her voice that made us all listen harder.
Caroline pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, her eyes blazing. Until this moment I had always seen Caroline as a mild person, someone who squealed rather than yelled, who labored over friendship bracelets pinned to her knee. But here she was, animated by her sense of injustice, training the full force of her fury onto Noni, whom we generally shielded from any conflict or emotional excess. Now, nearly six years after the Pause had ended, such precautions were perhaps unnecessary, but they had become routine.
“I … I …” Caroline stammered. Her resolve, so firmly stamped on her face, was not finding its way to her mouth. We watched our sister struggle for the right words. “I … I … I hate you,” Caroline said to Noni, and then she burst into tears and ran to her room.
A dangerous, damaged silence descended. I glanced sideways at Noni, trying to gauge her mood. But Noni merely sipped her wine, chewed her chop. Our mother was opaque to us, a combination of stubborn principles, disciplined instruction, and distance. It was Caroline who wore her heart on her sleeve. Our mother taught us how to protect ourselves from hurt but not how to determine what might be worth the risk.
Joe was the first to speak. He opened his eyes and said, “Should I apologize? This feels like my fault.”
“No, you should not apologize,” Noni replied in her no-nonsense way. “Just give her some time.” She sipped the last of her wine, then brought her plate to the kitchen and followed Caroline to her room. I could hear her knocking on the door and her patient voice. “Caroline, please let me in. Caro?”
Renee began to clear the table. I helped until the plates were stacked in the dishwasher, the wood wiped clean, Renee in her chair, pulling an acid yellow highlighter thick as a cigar across a page of her calculus book. The smell of meat and steam still lingered in the room. The front door was closed now, the house shut up tight, battened against the buggy spring night. Noni had gained entrance to Caroline’s room at last. I heard an occasional muffled sob, a brief angry shout.
Joe had finished his homework on the bus, he claimed, and stood in the hall, ear pressed to phone. I was on my way to the kitchen to find something more to eat. My chronic hunger was a residue from the Pause. It didn’t matter how much I ate during the day; always at night I’d feel an empty rumbling. As I passed Joe in the hall, he held his hand over the mouthpiece. “Battleship?” he asked me.
I heard a flash of feminine mumble, a giggling laugh.
Fragrant, flounce, hair, tease, pretty, smile, wink, sugar, sweet.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
I set up the game there on the floor of the hall, and we played, sitting cross-legged, facing each other. I ate a salami sandwich. Joe drank two glasses of milk and remained on the phone. He gave the conversation only the barest attention. D9. F10. A13. With each coordinate he placed his hand on the mouthpiece.
“You sank my battleship,” he told me.
“Yee-haw!” I whooped loudly.
Joe frowned and told the girl he needed to go. Feminine protest erupted on the other end. I could hear the tone but not the words: pout, cajoling, Joooooe. I widened my eyes and twirled an index finger at my forehead. Cuckoo, I signaled to Joe. You and all these stupid girls. I vowed then never to be like them, frivolous and weak-willed, with their glossy lips and padded bras, speaking for hours to a boy who only pretended to listen.
Joe kept my gaze. “Holly—” he said into the phone, but she kept interrupting him.
“I’m—”
“Listen—”
“Wait—”
And then he simply hung up.
“Your turn,” I said.
As we continued the game, Joe jiggled a knee, tapped an index finger against the floor, squinted and frowned. Back then some part of Joe was always in motion. A leg, a finger, a crack of the neck, a roll of the shoulders. He was still growing, his bones lengthening, skin expanding, his whole person surging forward into a bright unknown. Joe’s vitality seeped out of him, uncontainable. I felt it all the time.
“Fiona,” he said as we were clearing away the pieces of the game. He had won, but barely.
“What?”
“I’m glad you’re my little sister.”
I shrugged. “It’s not like I have a choice,” I replied, but I felt my big, hot heart spreading through my chest like a starfish, like a many-fingered creature that had finally found its treasure. “Noni wouldn’t let you trade me in anyhow.”
“True,” Joe said, and he grinned back at me, a faint milk mustache still clinging to the delicate blond hairs of his upper lip. He looked beautiful and sated and spent.
* * *
AND THEN, IN a heartbeat, with a rattle of Caroline’s armful of bracelets, the squeak of Renee’s running shoes, the funny hiccup of Joe’s laugh, my siblings were leaving home.
—cold, lonesome, lone, together, mother, brother, sister, other—
Picture the day: late summer in New England, humid and close, the lawn thick as shag from Noni’s tending. A day when we would have been at the pond. The year was 1992, and eighteen-year-old Joe was piling suitcases and plastic crates, a secondhand microwave, four pillows, three baseball bats, a life-size cardboard cutout of Bill and Ted into Noni’s Volvo station wagon.
“Do you really need the cardboard thing?” Noni asked, squinting into the sun. Dog-day cicadas whined with a high-pitched keen, a cyclical sound so pervasive you didn’t even notice it until it was all you noticed, and then, at that very moment, the sound began to fade.
“Yes,” Joe said solemnly. He was sweaty, wearing blue nylon shorts and a purple-and-green Mavericks tee. “I need them. I’m pretty sure it was on that list they sent. Books, sheets, Bill and Ted …”
“Okay, okay,” said Noni. “Bring Bill and Ted. But don’t blame me if your new roommate asks to switch.” She winked at Joe and slid the poster into the back of the car.
All morning Noni had pranced around like a golden retriever. Alden College! Our mother had won the parental college lottery: not Ivy League but close, with a full financial-aid package. Given Joe’s mediocre grades, no one thought he had a shot at a school like Alden, but Coach Marty knew the baseball coach. Alden needed a freshman center fielder, and Joe Skinner was it.
“Joe, don’t take Bill!” I called from my seat on the front lawn. “I love him!” For the first hour of packing, I had helped, sort of, but the tolerable morning temperature had given way so quickly to a sludgy, heavy heat that I’d declared myself overwhelmed and found a place in the shade. “Just cut Ted off,” I called. “Take Ted, but leave Bill.”
My childhood baby fat had not melted away as we all (or at least I) had assumed it would. That summer I was fifteen years old, alarmingly pudgy from puberty and Coke and frosted doughnuts and a general aversion to physical effort. For three long months, I’d moped around the house, reading too much sexed-up Updike and working a stinky, mindless job at a burger place in Bexley that paid me eight dollars an hour to cut tomatoes and onions and lift buns off the grill before they burned. I felt a persistent exhaustion brought on by the act of pushing my body through the days. My knees ached, my back ached, my fingers stank, my friends all annoyed me. I had no desire to grow older; I was already old enough.
I had started work on a dandelion chain when Nathan Duffy’s dented old VW pulled up to the house. The passenger door opened with a rattle, and out tumbled Caroline in a short flowery dress, her waist-length dirty-blond hair falling like a cape behind her.
“I’m so glad you guys haven’t left!” Caroline called to Joe. “I thought we’d missed saying good-bye.” She scanned the lawn. “Where’s Renee?”
I pointed: Renee was sitting on the bumper of the rented UHaul, the U-Haul she’d packed up the night before with everything she’d need for her first year of medical school at Boston University. A fine sheen of sweat covered her tan limbs, legs in micro running shorts. Her arms were crossed against her stomach, her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail that bobbed slightly as she tapped her foot. Renee, impatience personified.
“We’re still an hour away from leaving,” Renee told Caroline. She checked her watch, then looked pointedly at Joe. “At least.”
Joe grinned back. Look after your brother, Noni had said when it became clear they would both be going to school in Boston. And Renee had answered, Have I ever not?
Nathan ambled around to sit next to me on the grass. “Morning, Fiona,” he said.
“Renee, should we bring the snow boots now or wait till after Thanksgiving break?” Joe called across the lawn.
“Bring them,” Renee answered, examining a cuticle. “It might snow before we get back home.”
Back home. They were leaving, all of them. In one two-week stretch, I was losing Joe to college, Renee to medical school, and Caroline to Lexington, Kentucky. That spring Nathan had graduated early from University of Connecticut and was set to start a biology Ph.D. program. Caroline would transfer schools. Although there was still some question about her credits, there was no question that she was going with Nathan.
Noni and I would remain alone in the gray house.
“I’ll miss you, Fi,” Joe said. Sighing, he lay down beside me on the lawn and shaded his eyes with his hand. “A lot.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“You’ll be happy we’re gone. Really, you will. No more noise. No more of that awful Indigo Girls.” The last he said loudly in Renee’s direction, but she ignored him apart from a quick flip of her middle finger.
“Or farting,” said Caroline, staring pointedly at Joe. She lay down and settled her head on Nathan’s thigh. “The house will be a lot less stinky.”
“Um, Caroline,” said Joe, “perhaps you haven’t noticed, but our mother can pass gas like a champ. Right, Noni?”
“What? Joe?” Noni was coming out the front door carrying another box. “Joe, why are you lying down? Why is everyone on the grass? Aren’t we still packing?”
“I’m taking a break,” said Joe. “Fiona looked sad.”
“I am not sad,” I said quickly. It was a lie, of course, but I objected to the idea that I was so easy to read. The truth was that I didn’t want this, us here sprawled on the lawn, to end. I wanted this miserable, hot day to go on forever. I wanted Joe beside me, Caroline and Renee within earshot. All of us close enough to touch.
“Noni,” said Joe from his prone position, “I just want you to know that I plan to be home a lot, so don’t forget the Dr Pepper and the sour-cream-and-onion Lay’s potato chips, not that Pringles bullshit, and those peanut butter M&M’s and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream—any brand is okay, but it must be green.”
Noni stood above Joe, hands on her hips.
“Are you taking notes?” he asked. “Mental notes?”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. Now, would you get up and help me finish here?”
“Fiona needs me more,” Joe said, but he pushed himself up just enough to throw his arms around me and kiss me on the cheek, and then he was up, running back into the house.
“Yuck.” I rubbed Joe’s spit off my face. Nathan smiled, but there was tension and distraction in his face.
“Caro,” Nathan whispered to Caroline. Her eyes were closed. “Now?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered without opening her eyes.
“Now what?” I said. I’d heard a tremor in Nathan’s voice, an unmistakable wobble of excitement.
“I think we should get your mom,” Nathan said. Caroline’s eyes fluttered open.
Soon all of us stood in a loose circle in the shade thrown by the towering locust I had never been able to climb, all of us looking at Caroline and Nathan.
“Caroline, what is it?” asked Noni.
Nathan looked to Caroline, who smiled and nodded. Nathan cleared his throat, but it was Caroline who spoke. “We’re married!” she said, and clapped her hands quickly like a child.
The words dropped quiet as a cloud into our circle, and for a moment we all stood muzzled, stunned. A crow called across the empty street. Somewhere, a lawn mower started up with a bewildered buzz. Caroline was nineteen years old.
“Oh, Caroline,” Noni said, her voice thick, her face fallen.
“We did it last week, at the courthouse,” Caroline said, ignoring Noni. “Here’s the ring.” She held out her hand, and yes, there it was, a thin silver band with a stone so small it seemed merely a nick in the metal.
“And I thought I would be the last,” Noni said.
“The last what?” asked Caroline.
“The last to … to decide something like this. For a man.”
Caroline said nothing. Nathan shifted, his discomfort clear. We all waited as our mother considered the news of Caroline’s marriage. She shook her head and looked up at the sky, which was flat and heavy and absolutely blue. I thought she might yell or begin to cry, and for a moment all four of us stood poised to receive that, ready in that far-off, distant way we would always be ready to lose our mother again to turbulent, unbearable emotion.
Noni exhaled. She shook her head and grimaced and wiped her eyes. “Well, at least you’re not pregnant,” she said with a laugh. And then, anxiously: “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
Caroline giggled and shook her head no. “Well, congratulations, then,” Noni said. “This is … exciting!” And with that we all breathed once again.
“Congratulations!” I said. “What a surprise!” I hugged Caroline and stepped back to examine her. She didn’t look any different. I almost expected the weight of this event to show on her face, alter the light in her eyes. But no, the same limpid blue, the same pale smattering of freckles. Only Nathan seemed physically altered: he stood straighter, it seemed to me, shoulders more square. The responsibility perhaps weighed on him, or maybe it simply made him proud. Husband. Wife. Despite our mother’s lessons, or maybe because of them, I believed secretly and fervently in the heady promises of love. I believed it would mark us all in some irreversible, wonderful way. Even me someday.
And then, before I knew it, Renee and Joe were in the car, the sun falling in long lines through the low branches, Noni calling out last-minute driving directions, and Renee nodding and yelling out the window, “Don’t worry!”
“We’ll see you next week!” Noni called. In a few days, when Noni could take time off work, she and I would drive to Boston for the end of Joe’s orientation week. Then I would see his drafty dorm room, Alden’s emerald quad and sparkling baseball field, and meet a few of the boys who would become his teammates and fraternity brothers, his best friends. They all seemed cut from a mold: strong-boned, clear-eyed, with shockingly good posture. Joe looked like them. He fit in, I thought then; he had found his natural place. We would meet Joe’s coach—a tall blond man with dazzling teeth who spoke very fast and made me long for Coach Marty—and eat tepid pasta in the cavernous freshman dining hall. Throughout, Joe would usher us from one event to the next, building to building, with a sort of good-natured bafflement, as though he were as surprised as anyone to find himself here, amid the ivy-covered walls and straight-A students.
As Renee carefully released the parking brake and eased away from the house, I saw Joe freeze: a thin smile, a hand in mid-wave, a length of tan, strong arm.
“Good luck!” I called. This seemed the right thing to say, although I considered Joe already the luckiest, the most charmed. It seemed inevitable that all he wanted would line up before him like the balls that long ago Ace would pitch, pulling them one by one from his bulging pockets as we watched breathless from the stands.
Crack, crack, crack, crack!
Each hit was followed by a startling, whole silence as we watched the ball travel up into air and then breathlessly down, down, down, until it would land with a final dull thump in the grassy field.
PART II (#ulink_58ed6b7a-d35d-527f-9806-92c4c76e38b2)
Year 2079 (#ulink_8f5d4399-b12d-5714-bb0e-0fafd0d6f872)
THE LIGHTS IN the auditorium flickered once, then again. The microphone cut out and I stopped speaking. Henry, dear Henry, stood up from the front row and made his way onstage. He was only eighty-four, but his knees were bad from riding horses all those years, and so he limped a bit, winced as he climbed the steps. There was an empty chair beside me, vacated hastily by the venue organizer, and Henry took it and then took hold of my hand and brought it to his lips. In the second row, a young man and woman watched us. She had vivid red hair, the color of a flag, and the man’s arm circled her shoulders. Her hair fell across his chest. They, too, were holding hands. Entwined, I thought. Knotted, woven, linked.
And that was the moment the room plunged into darkness. I felt the pressure of Henry’s palm. There was one short, sharp scream from the balcony, but otherwise the crowd remained calm. No rush for the exits, no hysteria. This kind of thing happened too frequently now for it to rouse much of a panic. Still, I felt the heightened tension in the room. The shallow breathing, hands squeezing hands, sweat rising on palms, eyes staring into nothing. Whispers of confusion and comfort.
We waited in darkness for one minute, three, five. My thoughts turned to Luna, the young Luna here in the room and the other Luna out there somewhere. Was that Luna still alive? Did she ever wonder about me, too? Did she wear a diamond ring on her finger? On a chain around her neck? Or was it hidden away in a drawer, unworn and forgotten?
My eyes adjusted. A few exit signs glowed orange. The greenish hue of screens flickered like fireflies on a summer night. I remembered the security check: DEVICES STRICTLY FORBIDDEN INSIDE THE AUDITORIUM! But of course there are always people who will find a way to break the rules.
“The whole city is out!” one woman declared, reading from a bright light.
This information provoked more agitation, groans, and some hurried, hushed conversations. Who cares if the city is out? I thought. Perhaps it was one of those megastorms, or a tremor deep underground, or a hurricane off the coast of Borneo. The news exhausted me. The news bored me. What did it matter? Here we sat, the proverbial ducks. We might as well just reach for the chocolate candy in our pockets, hold the hand of the one we love best, and smile.
Backstage I heard the rustle and hurried footfalls of venue staff doing their best to turn the lights on again.
“We’ve got it,” a voice called, “the generator.” There was the thump of a heavy lever being pulled and dim yellow lights emerged along the base of the walls and along the rows between seats.
Suddenly the space was transformed. It was no longer dark and menacing, nor was it a grand auditorium divided between stage and audience. It was now simply a room, a large, cozy room with an arched ceiling and many, many chairs. Oh, this is something, I thought. Now we can have a proper chat. Now we can get down to the things that matter.
The young woman Luna had been perched on a folding chair. Now she again stood. She tapped the microphone gently, but it was dead, of course, and so she called out, “Ms. Skinner?”
I felt a surge of great affection for her, irrational in its intensity. That mole, high on her right cheek. I struggled to recall the other Luna, the Luna from a lifetime ago.
“Yes, dear,” I said. “Please go ahead.” I wanted to scoop her up and protect her, to ferry her out of here and back to my house in the woods with its fence and bunker and generator and fresh-spring well. There I might convince myself that we were safe.
“When did the unraveling begin?” Luna asked.
“The unraveling?” I repeated.
“You said this was a story about the failures of love,” said Luna, her tone accusatory. “That’s what you said.”
“Yes. I did say that.”
“You repeat the word unraveling several times in The Love Poem. You said there was happiness in your family, and then—” Luna did not finish the sentence. She left the question hanging over me, over us all.
“And then,” I repeated. I cleared my throat. I glanced at Henry, and he winked, nodded for me to continue. If there is one thing I have succeeded at in life, I thought then, it’s choosing husbands.
When did Joe’s unraveling begin? I considered how to answer Luna’s question. When he met Sandrine? Or took the job at Morgan Capital? Or was it when his baseball career ended with one slide into home? Maybe it began even earlier, when he was still a child who looked like a man, tall and golden, watched and worshipped in Bexley like the local god of any small village. Later, when I asked my sisters, Caroline believed that it began during the Pause, when the ways in which love might disappear first became known to us. We were too young, Caroline said, for that kind of wisdom.
Renee said no, the Pause didn’t do that to Joe. Look at the day of our father’s funeral when he raged and howled. Renee believed that the unraveling began then, in the yellow house, Joe with the fireplace poker, surrounded by all those who loved him and no one, not one of us, able to help. From that moment, she believed, it was written across his skin, embedded within the veins.
To unravel is to unknit, disconnect, untangle, separate. To fall apart.
“I will tell you this,” I replied. “The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.” I was speaking directly to Luna now, not to the woman with the red hair and her partner, not to Henry, not to the faceless masses here in the hall who had paid money to see me speak. Only to Luna. “The unraveling began—” I said, but then stopped myself, tilted my head. “I don’t know when it began, I’m afraid. But I do remember when I first became aware that it was happening.”
Chapter 5 (#ulink_7e1f9060-1490-51c6-a872-a0789c312f77)
IT WAS AUTUMN 2004. An election year, long enough after 9/11 that we no longer spoke of it every day but close enough that the Manhattan skyline still looked broken. I had agreed to help Caroline clean out her new rental house in the small town of Hamden, Connecticut. I’d seen Caroline and her family infrequently since she and Nathan had left Bexley. In twelve years they’d moved four times, from one university town to the next in search of Nathan’s Ph.D. in biology and a permanent teaching position. The Skinner-Duffys now numbered five: Nathan, Caroline, ten-year-old Louis, and the twins, six-year-old Lily and Beatrix. Their most recent moves had been to cities where one of Nathan’s siblings lived—his brother Terry in Columbus, his sister Maddy in Austin. We’d assumed they’d settle there in Texas, the kids growing up with drawls and a fondness for BBQ, but last month Nathan had received a tenure-track offer from Hamden College, a cozy liberal-arts school located thirty minutes from Noni in Bexley and an hour’s train ride from me, Renee, and Joe in New York City.
Caroline was finally coming home.
“I’m happy to help with the move,” I told Caroline. “Whatever you need me to do.”
“Oh, Fi, thank you,” said Caroline. We were on the phone, Caroline in Austin, me in my apartment in Queens that I shared with Jenji and Beth, two friends from Vassar and a third, Umani, we’d found on Craigslist. I was twenty-seven years old and worked as an editorial assistant at an environmental NGO called ClimateSenseNow! My job sounded good at dinner parties, but it required little more than correcting the maddening typos of my boss, Homer Goshen, Ph.D., and writing the occasional high-minded press release. Because of this, and because I was paid less per hour than an adolescent babysitter, I felt justified in taking regular sick days. Inexplicably, Homer allowed it. Hope that ankle heals up, he’d say over the phone, or That must be a nasty bug. A guilty pang always followed these calls, but rarely was it strong enough to make me go to work.
“The Goats are useless,” Caroline continued. “No one can come, even for a few hours. They’re all so busy getting married or finishing their dissertations or whatever. Emily showed at New York Fashion Week, did Noni tell you?”
Emily was Nathan’s second sister, a recent graduate of FIT, prone to wearing foodstuff as clothing.
“She hasn’t mentioned it,” I said, although of course Noni had. “It’s hard to keep up with the achievements of those Duffys.” In the background I heard one of the twins singing a nonsense song and Louis calling, “Mom, where’s my oboe?”
“I’m glad you’re moving back east, Caroline,” I said.
“God, so am I.” There was a muffled pause as she spoke to Louis, and then she returned. “And, Fiona,” she said, “we need to talk about Joe.”
“Sure.” I was hungover, eating potato chips out of the bag, and I paused to lick salt from my fingers. “Joe, sure,” I said, and then we spoke a bit longer about flight arrivals and train times, and then I hung up the phone.
I didn’t think much about why Caroline had mentioned our brother. It was one week before Joe’s engagement party, and I assumed she wanted to discuss the wedding. He was set to marry Sandrine Cahill, a popcorn blonde who worked as an accessories buyer at Barneys. Sandrine grew up outside Chicago, the only child of an industrious midwestern family that presided over the manufacture of something ubiquitous but boring, like computer paper or parts of a car. Sandrine was not objectionable in any obvious way. She came from sensible money, and she worked hard to build on it, yet there was something ruthless in her pursuit of the good life. New York did that, I think, to some people. Sandrine wanted prestige and fancy things. She wanted recognition, and she wanted you to know exactly what she possessed: a front-row seat at Marc Jacobs, perfect abdominals, a position in the Junior League, a dinner reservation at Nobu. I couldn’t stand her, nor could Renee, but Caroline the eternal optimist insisted we were being unfair. Surprisingly, Noni tolerated her, too. I think our mother secretly admired Sandrine, even after the engagement fell apart, for her collection of achievements. I couldn’t help but feel Noni’s comparison and judgment: If only Fiona were such a go-getter! Think what she might accomplish.
On Tuesday morning I took the train from Grand Central Station through the city bustle and vacant lots and gray, low urban sprawl, out past the suburbs proper, and into the wider expanses of green until we reached the small middle- and working-class towns like Danbury and Woodbury and Hamden.
Caroline, in a red coat, waved at me from the platform. “You’re so skinny,” she said as we hugged, and it was neither a compliment nor a complaint. I’d lost another twenty pounds since she’d seen me last Christmas. It was now October.
“Just wait until you see the house,” Caroline said. “It looks exactly like a castle. I think this will be it. Our forever home!” She winked. The forever home had been her black swan for years now. After the third move, from Mississippi to Ohio, Caroline began talking about the forever home the way first-graders talked about the tooth fairy. Could it possibly exist? Would she ever see it?
We drove alongside the Metro-North train tracks and rows of beaten-down bungalows, through Hamden’s low-lying downtown, then past the green college quad and sports fields and into the residential neighborhood where professors lived in rambling old homes with poster boards of KERRY-EDWARDS ’04 perched on every lawn. Caroline accelerated and slowed as she squinted at house numbers. It was late morning, sunny and crisp, trees capped with bright orange leaves. Hamden reminded me so much of Bexley: the same splintery homes, pavement surging with tree roots, the same pumpkins with the same toothy faces. Along the sidewalk, a girl kicked sullenly at leaves, her body thick beneath a pink parka, her legs stout and round as logs. As we passed her in the car, I felt an ache not of nostalgia or grief but something in between the two.
“Here it is,” Caroline said at last, and pulled in to a short, gravelly drive.
The front yard of Caroline’s forever home was covered with damp, unraked leaves and flanked by a row of overgrown shrubs. A fallen tree branch long as the car. A side bed of brittle, brown daisies. A white plastic bag stuck on a bush that flapped in the breeze. Caroline’s eyes swept over the mess, but she didn’t comment on it, just tilted her head back to take stock.
The house was a pale lavender with yellow trim, the paint faded and flaking. Green clumps of moss clung to the steeply pitched roof, and the front steps were grayed and sagging with age. But the place was large, a true Victorian, with tall windows, gabled molding, and, best of all, a rounded towerlike structure with its own pointed roof rising from the second story.
“It’s just like a castle,” Caroline said, turning to me, eager as a puppy for affirmation. It was a look I’d never seen before. I was so young when Caroline left Bexley, and then she’d always lived so far away. And all those blond, clever Goats took possession of Caroline in a way that I understood and resented only years later. They helped her through pregnancies and childbirths. They advised on what kind of minivan to buy, would Montessori be a good fit for Louis, do the twins really need that DTaP vaccine? She let herself be folded into the Duffys, and who could blame her? Two bright, chirpy parents, cousins and family football games at Thanksgiving. The Skinners were too few and too complicated to compete with all that photogenic togetherness.
But now here she was. Her hair hung lank from airplane air, her red coat was too thin for this chilly day. She’d arrived into JFK at five fifteen that morning, traveling all this way for a house she’d seen only in photographs.
“You’re right, Caroline,” I said, and smiled. “A castle.”
We opened the front door and stepped into a damp and penetrating cold. I shivered. We stood at the foot of a wide staircase that led up into darkness. To our left, the large living room was bare, with a sooty fireplace on the far wall that gaped dark and menacing as a wound. There was dust everywhere and a dry brown substance crusting the shadowy corners of the room. The place smelled of mold and something else. Something closed-in, musty, animal.
Caroline dropped the bag of cleaning supplies to the floor.
“I think we might need some help,” I said. “What about Renee or Joe?”
“Renee’s taking on extra ER shifts,” Caroline answered in a monotone. “As if the surgical fellowship isn’t enough. And Joe … I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.” The last she said vaguely, walking away from me into the dim interior of the house.
We went room to room, the only sound our dull footsteps and Caroline’s occasional sharp intake of breath as another mess or sign of age came into view. In the kitchen there was a squat white refrigerator with a long silver handle and a walk-in pantry, its shelves lined with scraps of greasy paper, smelling of old bacon and ammonia. In the hall we found one half bath with an unspeakable toilet. In the dining room, cobwebs intricate as chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
We finished our circle and arrived back in the living room.
“Caroline, can the college find you another house?” I asked gently. The kids and Nathan were set to arrive from Austin in two days.
“Oh, no, this is the only one,” she replied. “It’s rent-to-buy. It’s all we can afford.” Her eyes were bright. “But I love it. It’s perfect. That big front window? These original floors?” She rubbed a toe along a floorboard to reveal a grainy, dark wood beneath the dirt. “Let’s get started.”
And so we began to clean with spray bottles and brushes and paper towels, wearing unwieldy yellow gloves and those small paper masks I associated with Asian flus and hypochondriacs. As we worked side by side, I realized how good it felt to have her back. I’d missed Caroline for herself, but what I’d missed more was the idea of us, the four Skinner siblings, together. She was the missing piece of the puzzle of adulthood that I’d been trying for years to put together here in New York with Joe and Renee. Now I could be the quirky aunt to Caroline’s kids, taking them to gallery shows and poetry readings in the city, teaching them to swear, and buying them candy. Renee would be the role model who showed them how to work hard and succeed, who examined their cut knees with professional concern. And Uncle Joe would tell them fart jokes, give them extravagant electronics for their birthdays, teach them to catch and throw. Joe still loved baseball, even if he no longer played, and who knew? Maybe Louis would be a natural. And here in Hamden, Caroline would host family dinners where we’d all gather and make toasts and drink and eat cake and play Scrabble. At last we would be siblings who were no longer children.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/tara-conklin/the-last-romantics/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Tara Conklin
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: Sweeping and epic, The Last Romantics is an unforgettable portrait of one perfectly imperfect family – the Skinner siblings – and how the consequences of one fateful summer will change their lives forever.The stunning new novel from the New York Times bestselling author, Tara Conklin.Meet the Skinner siblings: fierce Renée, dreamy Caroline, golden boy Joe and watchful Fiona.Their story begins with the sudden death of their father and a period known as The Pause; one free and feral summer spent at the neighbourhood pond, which will bind the Skinners tightly together, and irrevocably shape the course of their lives.Two decades later, the adult siblings have scattered. But tragedy will draw them back together once again. They’ll be forced to question the life choices they’ve made and ask what, exactly, they will do for love.Beautifully told with warmth and heartbreak, The Last Romantics is a compelling story about family, the ways in which four siblings grow together & apart, the thousand little ways in which they can betray one another – but also how they’ll always find home.