The East End

by Jason Allen

  The unreality of that thought struck like a fist. She pressed both hands to her chest, exhaled a long breath and simultaneously heard her own whispered words, “What the hell am I going to do?” When no answer followed she faced the bedroom door and knocked again. “Corey, come on. I don’t have all day.”

  Finally, the door opened and her son stood before her. Gina felt her heart beating faster once again as their eyes met and he quickly looked at the floor. Angelique sat on the bed with her face behind her hair, nervously picking at her thumbnail. None of the furniture had been rearranged.

  Gina stepped back and waved Corey into the hall. “You mopped the porch, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and made a show of exhaling with a huff, “even though it looked fine to begin with.”

  “I’m not surprised, but we do as she asks, right?”

  Corey slowly shook his head.

  “I need you to go out to the shed and get all the tiki torches, the big citronella candles, and bring it all to the side of the house by the porch. After that, come find me in the kitchen. Josie could use your help, but Missus Sheffield also might have something else for you to do by then.”

  Corey turned back to Angelique as he answered, “Okay, Ma, I’m on it.” And the girl looked up with her hands in her lap, her eyes glassy, her thin frame curled inward and tensed like a timid fawn.

  “Sorry to sidetrack him, Mrs. Halpern. He’s been helping me.”

  “That’s all right, dear. And you can call me Gina, like always.”

  Corey walked the hall ahead of her surprisingly fast, as though trying to escape, but she jogged to catch up and grabbed his arm. “Wait,” she said, huddling with him at the top of the stairs. “What the hell were you two talking about in there?”

  “Nothing,” he said, though he still couldn’t look at her, and just then Sheila exited the master bedroom to their left.

  “Oh good, I found you,” Sheila said to Gina, and a moment after she began talking, Corey slipped down the stairs.

  Once Sheila left her, Gina held the banister tighter than usual, stepping down the stairs as if they were a slippery moss-covered slope, feeling as though she might not be able to hold back a scream. When she finally reached the bottom, she made more of an effort to keep her eyes open and said hello to a woman entering the house through a screen door—Barbara, one of Sheila’s wealthier nonprofit cohorts, whose eyes Gina had never seen, as she always kept half her face blacked-out by oversize Jackie O sunglasses.

  Barbara paused to ask, “Any updates on that storm that might be passing through tomorrow?”

  She’d caught Gina off guard. “There’s a storm forecasted, or forecast?” She slipped into nervous laughter. “Sorry, I haven’t been keeping track of the weather.”

  “I see,” Barbara said warily, walking off before Gina could pull together a friendly parting comment.

  Back in the kitchen, even as her obsessive thoughts about Corey’s involvement with Angelique and Leo continued flaring, the next few hours passed in a blur. She’d worked within the eye of a whirling holiday weekend enough times to function on cruise control, sidestepping disaster like a ballerina until finally being allowed to leave for the night, frazzled and exhausted. The chaos was oddly comforting today. As long as she stayed in perpetual motion in the midst of everyone bustling around her, she could hide out in the open.

  * * *

  By early evening she knew she needed to avoid close interactions, as she imagined she may have secretly gulped a few too many fingers of vodka and taken a few too many pills to convincingly pass as one hundred percent sober. It had taken a concerted effort to focus when coordinating with the party tent people and the extra waitstaff, but she’d otherwise mainly kept her head down and her hands busy with the charcuterie boards and hors d’oeuvres trays, answering yes or no to questions from Sheila or Josie or Michael, or from the random guests who wandered through the kitchen to pick at the plates of gourmet ingredients scattered about.

  After swallowing all but two of the pills and refilling her thermos with vodka and a splash of cranberry juice once—or had it been twice?—she realized she may have overdone it a tad. But a couple hours from now the drinks would be flowing freely, and then no one would notice and no one would care if she had her own cocktail in hand or if she appeared a little tipsy. Just ride it out until then, that’s all she had to do.

  Mr. Sheffield had been conspicuously absent at dinner. As far as Gina knew, he hadn’t left his room all day; he hadn’t shown his face to anyone since the two of them exited the woods many hours before sunrise, just after he’d begged her to keep his secret. He’d been decent to her over the years, but even if his story were true—that the man out there had died in an accident—shouldn’t she call the police? Shouldn’t Leo? How long could a dead body on the property be kept secret?

  * * *

  Later in the night, she went upstairs to change into her turquoise summer dress and strappy shoes. She had, thankfully, somehow made it through the twenty-person dinner without spilling anything on anyone or saying something inappropriate. Now, she looked at her phone and saw that Ray had called four times in half as many hours. Doing her best to block him from her mind, she quickly erased his voice mails without bothering to listen. She swayed on her way out of the bathroom, and from there balanced herself with her free hand, gripping chair backs and pressing against the edge of the long dining table until she made it to the lake side of the house. She exited through a screen door and stepped onto the porch, feeling like an alien amid the classical music and boisterous guests, struck by the odors of expensive perfumes and citronella candles and the glitter of jewelry dangling from earlobes and draped above well-tanned cleavage.

  Excusing herself, she slid by a married couple—a woman in a sequined cocktail dress and her husband in a gray Armani suit—then had an unfortunate moment of eye contact with the creep who’d asked her to save him a dance. With a wobble here and a wobble there she slipped around a dense cluster of well-dressed guests and hurried down the porch steps to the wide entrance of the party tent, only to recoil in disgust when she looked back and saw the creep adjusting his belt once again, laughing along with two other Ted Kennedy look-alikes, then saying something while raising his glass and—eew—winking again.

  Her dress felt too thin. Everyone else seemed engrossed in conversation while she stood alone, smoothing down the fabric on her hip and pretending to read something from her phone. I have to get out of here, she thought, then flashed a smile at one of the waiters passing by with a silver hors d’oeuvre tray, remembering the only aspect of the party that held any appeal—the wet bar. She politely fought her way over, as if swimming there, the thick bass from three cellos drowning out all the voices until the bartender shouted back, asking her to repeat her drink order.

  Sometime later, with yet another lovely drink in hand, Gina felt a haze spread all around her. A man in a snappy blue sport coat who’d been smiling suddenly frowned and walked off. A blink later a woman with big teeth and a mole on her chin squinted at her and said something unbecoming. Gina fantasized about spitting at someone, smiled when she imagined whipping down someone’s slacks from behind. Then she drifted from the party while standing perfectly still, recalling and then reliving one of the more intense arguments with Ray, yelling back at him this time.

  Her eyes snapped open as Sheila said something to her and grabbed her shoulder. She may or may not have answered her question before Sheila disappeared in a blur. The bartender handed Gina another drink. She said, “Huzzah,” raised it high, then drank, wiping some dribbled liquid from her chest and her dress.

  She looked around. Voices blended. Faces warped, mouths and eyes exaggerated, as if the tent were lined with funhouse mirrors. What time was it? How long had she been out here?

  I should find someplace to lie down, she thought, sipping her new vodka tonic and turning, the scene blurring
as though she were riding a slowly spinning merry-go-round. Stunned by the sight of him staring at her, she accidentally swallowed an ice cube—then, squinting, she took a wobbly step back.

  For the first time all day, she and Leo stood face-to-face.

  He looked as though he’d slept in his clothes, and the ball cap on his head had a sideways tilt. His overall appearance, along with his hangdog expression, told her all she needed to know. He obviously hadn’t come downstairs to join the party. He’d come outside for no other reason than to talk to her.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sheila summoned Leo from his hiding place, obviously irate as she banged on their locked bedroom door with the side of her fist and ordered him downstairs to address the “Gina situation.” He gripped the edge of the mattress while she shouted through the door and spelled out the reasons why Leo could no longer use his injury as an excuse to remain holed up in their bedroom. Gina had drunk far too much and was stumbling around; she’d been muttering nasty things at the guests, making a spectacle of herself. Basically ruining the party. Sounding incensed, Sheila finally demanded, “Leo, you need to tell her to leave. She’s an embarrassment. If you don’t take care of this, I will. But if you leave it up to me, I’m going to tell her never to come back.”

  “I’ll be down,” he said, with his mouth beside the door, though he would have preferred a root canal or an audit by the IRS; anything to avoid going down to the party.

  “And you can go back to forgetting about any exchange of toasts between us tomorrow night. You and your pet housekeeper have already relegated this weekend to a crisis management exercise—at best.”

  Once she stormed off, Leo threw on the wrinkled shirt and khakis he’d worn to the hospital and slipped a ball cap with his company logo over his freshly stitched head. He descended the stairs, slowly walked through the downstairs rooms and eased the creaking screen door open, exiting the house as some shadow version of his previous self, with timid steps, brimming with paranoia. The mock chandeliers hanging from the porch ceiling and tent canopy blazed like spotlights. He squinted, hoping to locate Gina right away and to skip any interactions with the guests. The headache he’d had upstairs was already a hundred times worse, as the musicians were in the midst of playing a string-heavy movement with far too many high notes, the violins especially torturous as they screeched out arpeggios. He avoided eye contact, well aware that he looked like shit. Hungry, dehydrated, he felt shaky, hollow. Stepping from the screen door, he tried to ignore the sense that he was now a freak show attraction and everyone in the vicinity had noticed him.

  He located Gina a few feet beyond the entrance of the massive tent, bent over with both elbows on the bar. She turned from the bartender with her drink at her lips and faced him, stumbled back, staring at him, expressionless, eyes glassy. He braced for what she might say in front of everyone, imagining what she could shout out. She was drunk, and a drunk person always had far less of a filter. Any second now, she’d ruin a lot more than Sheila’s goddamned party.

  He took a cautious step toward her. She shook her head disapprovingly, and then, rather than saying anything, she shoved him aside and awkwardly skirted past. She left the tent and climbed the steps with a limping gait, using the handrail as a crutch, and then stumbled along like a pinball through the crowd of guests on the left-hand side of the porch until she disappeared. From over his shoulder, speaking above the orchestra, the bartender asked if he wanted a drink. Leo didn’t answer. His attention had been drawn to Clay’s dog, the sound of her tags jingling as she weaved through the well-dressed crowd with her tail wagging and some sort of cloth clamped in her mouth.

  Then his eyes focused on the doorway above the porch steps, directly in front of him, where Angelique gazed at him from the other side. Another figure stood in the screen-covered space beside her. Corey. Leo’s thoughts returned to earlier in the day, the moments before he’d broken his glass on the balcony, the sense of urgency, the T. S. Eliot line about the world’s demise looping through his mind when Sheila stopped him on the lawn. Corey had followed the dog out into the pines, so now he must know about Henry, too. He must have seen his body out there... Had to have seen him... And now he and Angelique stood like ghosts in the doorway, staring down at him, side by side.

  Leo reached up and pressed his hand to the back of his ball cap where it covered his stitches. The orchestra music and voices of the party faded. During all these torturous hours since regaining consciousness on the lawn, he’d had no idea who’d been with Angelique Thursday night. Recalling now what she’d said in the garden—that her boyfriend took photos and thought they should call the cops—he removed the cap from his head and pressed the wound harder, until the pain filled his vision with tracers.

  Tiffany approached dressed in her grungiest paint-spattered overalls and a black bra, with a burning cigarette stuck in an extremely long, old-fashioned filter, which she demonstrably extended from one hand while swishing a brandy snifter in the other.

  Her friend and Gina’s son left the screen door frame the same moment she asked, “You okay, Dad?”

  “Sure,” he answered, grinning at his daughter’s affront to the otherwise well-dressed affair. “And what does your mother think of you being out here in this outfit?”

  “She said that if she hadn’t given birth to me she would doubt that I was hers.”

  “Sounds like something she would say.”

  “You sure you’re all right, sport? You look a little spaced-out.”

  “Not one hundred percent,” Leo said, “but a little better than before.” He rested a hand on his daughter’s shoulder and gave her a peck on the cheek as he headed back toward the house, toward the doorway where Angelique and Corey had been, finally with an idea of who might have hit him.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  With her vodka tonic in hand, Gina left Leo without a word and wandered away from the party toward the flames of the tiki torches that Corey had staked into a wide semicircle around the lawn. The alcohol and pills and the flapping torch fire beside her all began to effectively smudge the ambient noise and the features of most of the faces of the guests on the porch, and meanwhile the music also helped to dilute whatever traces of anxiety would have otherwise remained. Leo wanted reassurance, but she had nothing left to give. She wanted to forget all that he’d said and all that she’d seen in the woods last night. She needed to be alone and to drink her drink without a mask. Out there on the lawn, she could do as she pleased. Clear her mind. Forget about Leo. Forget about Ray. Just drink. Listen to the music. And drink some more.

  After a while, the orchestra’s instruments seemed to liquefy. She lost all sense of time. Her eyelids flitted as she stood beside the softly dancing torch flame. She sank down to sit on her heels, watching a blurry group of women bedecked in designer gowns, listening to one of them ramble in a high-pitched voice about the most extravagant party she’d ever attended during her summers in the Hamptons, at someplace she kept referring to as “The Castle.” Jesus, they’re awful, Gina thought, leaning forward with a hand flat on the grass, trying to sip her drink, wishing she had a chair or even a blanket to sit on.

  Just then she spotted Tiffany pantomiming the women she’d been watching. “Mmm-hmm, darling,” Tiffany said, while stepping past them with her long cigarette holder poised at her lip. “Isn’t it grand, darling? Yes, by all means, to think that we’re the problem with the world, and somehow the world is our oyster. And even more delicious—” she paused to smoke theatrically “—that oyster of ours is always just waiting to be shucked.”

  One of the women must have noticed Tiffany’s antics, and turned to face her, head cocked. “Are you speaking to us, dear?”

  And Tiffany replied with a flourish, “Horrible hag says what?”

  “What?” The woman was stern-faced now, as were the others. Tiffany answered by pinching the sides of her decrepit overalls, the cigarette holder and snifter
balanced in her hands as she sank down to curtsy. Then she meandered away from them across the lawn, with her middle finger extended over one shoulder, and approached Gina, laughing as the two made eye contact.

  Gina raised her glass and smiled wide, about to call out to her, Thank you! But then a loud voice derailed her thought and forced her eyes to open wider, and at the same time spun Tiffany around—Leo shouting at his son from the corner of the porch, “Clayton, put the damn dog inside the house!”

  Gina stood and took a wobbly step closer, away from the torch fire, and a few steps later passed by Tiffany, who’d corkscrewed down to her knees while tilting back the snifter to lick the final drops of brown liquor from the rim. Walking a hazy line to the porch, Gina locked her gaze on Leo’s bandaged head, watching him try to wrestle something away from Polly. The dog had a piece of fabric in her mouth and Leo finally yanked it away from her right before she bolted off down the steps. Polly ran by Gina and nearly plowed over Tiffany before hooking left toward the lake and fading into the darkness, and Leo raised his hand, looking as though he intended to call out, either to her or his drunk daughter or the dog. But no words escaped his mouth. He looked down at the cloth he’d wrestled from Polly’s jaw. His mouth went slack. He let the cloth slip from his hand.

  Something was wrong with him. She took another step as Leo reeled for a moment and staggered toward her. He clutched the railing where it met the corner post. Gina staggered a bit herself but managed to keep her balance, and after a few steps went from walking to running toward him. Leo’s face tightened severely, his legs giving out, his left hand curled like a claw. She reached him just as he released the corner post, though not in time to catch him. Gasping, with his right palm pressed to his chest, he slumped down as though he’d been shot.