by Ethan Joella
“Mrs. Crowley.” Ginger licks her lips, and Darcy can see how red her face is. “I knew you’d be disappointed. I’m sorry about the way this happened. All I did was think about Luke for so long afterward.”
“Come in,” Darcy says then, and Ginger closes the car door.
Inside, the house is cool. Darcy is happy she keeps the house clean for this very reason: unexpected company. She wonders how long it has been since Ginger’s been here. In a way, she is bitter toward her, but she is also so happy to have her here. You’re back, she wants to say.
Every time Ginger ever came over, Darcy felt relief and hope. When Luke was with her, she knew he wouldn’t get into trouble. Not like with that Chucky, who wouldn’t look you in the eye. What will she say to Ginger? She offers her water, lemonade, some cookies, but Ginger politely declines. She sees the puzzled look on her face when Darcy suggests they go to the basement. “It’s cooler down there,” Darcy says, and Ginger follows her down the steps.
Ginger looks around, and Darcy tries to see what she sees. Does it look like a normal room with the shoji screen she has placed in front of the washer and dryer, with the vase of lilies on the coffee table and her morning paper set there precisely? Did the new throw pillows she bought for the sofa the other day help anything? The blue curtains Wally put the rods up for today hang stiffly (just pressed at the cleaners), and there are now framed pictures of Luke and Mary Jane as children on the television cabinet.
“I don’t remember it being so homey down here,” Ginger says. “How nice.”
Darcy nods pleasantly. “It’s a shame we never used it much.”
Ginger points to the corner. “He used to have his music stuff over there. I’d sit on a folding chair and listen as he played.”
“I don’t know what became of all that,” Darcy says, surprising herself with the lie. She hardly ever lies, but she realizes how heartless it seems for a mother to give away something so precious to her son, especially after the son dies. Why does she only realize something like this after the fact? Why is she missing that sentimental gene other mothers seem to have? Ginger’s expression as she stares at the empty corner haunts her. Darcy stares at the drumsticks in her hand guiltily and places them on the sofa.
“Those were his, right?” Ginger says.
She nods.
“He was so talented.”
“He was.” She hears the words and realizes she never knew this. Was he? His singing mostly sounded like shouting. Darcy found herself distracted by the drums, the blaring speakers. How could she not feel his songs in the tender way that others seemed to? How could she have cared so little? What did that do to him? She only saw him perform a few times: once as the opening act before a high school play when he sang something by Elvis. She just never liked Elvis, so she didn’t know if he was good. She only wished when he played that he would have combed his hair better, tucked his shirt in. He was so talented. She stares at the corner, and everything feels so far away. Luke was a stranger to her when all was said and done. Who are you really mad at? Von would say.
They stand in silence. Ginger finally sits down on the edge of one of the La-Z-Boy chairs, and Darcy sits beside the drumsticks. Darcy clears her throat. “So the… wedding… is when?”
“October.”
“Big? Small?” Her chest is tight. She keeps her teeth pressed together.
“Medium-sized, I guess. But my mom just said there’s not much family to invite anymore. It seems like everyone…” She lets that sentence trail off.
“Well, good. Good, good, Ginger.” She crosses her legs and holds her knee. She knows her face must look so cruel as she says all this. “You deserve to be happy. You were always a wonderful girl.”
“Thanks.” She straightens herself. “And, as I said in the letter, if you and Mary Jane want to come…”
She sighs. She wants to say, Are you really that naive, for pity’s sake? “Thank you, but I don’t think so.”
“Oh, okay.” She looks down.
Darcy feels agitated again. “Don’t worry about us. Just be happy.”
Ginger looks directly at her. “But you’re angry.” Darcy is reminded why she always loved her. She is not only smart, well-mannered, and beautiful. She is brave.
“No.”
“You are.”
“Stop, Ginger. Give me a break.” The central air system comes on, rumbling in the closet, and Ginger startles.
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that. I mean, why should you be? What did we all think we’d do, just sit around and light candles for him forever? Go through his high school yearbook nightly? I don’t know what else there is to do but move on.” Except this mourning, this devotion, is actually closer to what she wants. Now Ginger moves home. Now of all times. Where in heaven were you years ago when you could have come back and changed things?
Ginger looks at her. “Then why are you angry?”
Darcy stands. “I can’t have this conversation.”
“It’s no one’s fault, Mrs. Crowley.”
This punches her. “I don’t know about that.” She is furious. God, she hasn’t been this angry in forever. She wants to shake Luke as hard as she can for doing this to her, for making her miss him this much. She wants to scream at Ginger for moving back now, doing it for this new guy. She could spit.
“Please don’t be angry with Luke. Please forgive him. It was an accident. Just bad luck, or something.” Ginger starts to cry, and her voice changes. “I’ve forgiven him. I’ve tried to forgive myself for not helping him.”
“He played by his own rules, didn’t he?”
Ginger stands. She looks for a second like she might hug Darcy, but she stays where she is. Lord, she knows Darcy well.
“I wanted better for him,” Darcy allows herself to say.
“I know.”
“But you go get married.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I am angry with you. And I know I shouldn’t be. I’m just a bitter old woman who can’t make sense of any of this.”
Ginger shrugs, wipes her tears. “You feel like you’re being loyal to him if you punish me, right?”
Darcy puts her head down. She can only see the lackluster rug. “I’m one of the last things left of his life, I guess. Who even will remember him?”
Ginger looks at her, her eyes wet. “We all will. He was special.”
“I guess I missed that.”
“No, you didn’t.” Ginger wraps an arm around Darcy’s back. “You knew.” She holds her tightly. “You knew.”
Then the tears come. Darcy feels uncivilized. She feels foolish, but she is safe with Ginger. They are safe down in this basement, Luke’s time machine. “God, I loved him.” She sobs as she says this. “I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t ever understand… he was so lost. I kept pestering him, but I didn’t understand.”
She wonders about her makeup. She must look so ugly. “I never clapped for him. I never saw him sing the way a nice mother would. My dear, he thought about you so much after you went away. He was lost without you, and then Mr. Crowley died, and Mary Jane and I were there for each other, and he was all alone. I should have told him to go after you. I should have let him be messy with his feelings, let him tell me how he felt.”
“You loved him,” Ginger whispers.
She nods. “But I wanted better.”
They don’t say anything. They stand there in the quiet basement, and Darcy feels her anger lighten a bit. What would Luke say if he saw them there? She looks at his red drumsticks, and wishes she could give them to Ginger.
But she wants to keep them. To hold them where her son’s hands were.
20. Highways
If you fly over Connecticut in a helicopter, you might be surprised to see all the rivers: the Naugatuck, the Connecticut, the Farmington, the Housatonic. Rivers everywhere, blue and brilliant among thick green trees and spreading hills, like blood vessels splitting up the state.
Conn
ecticut could be a dozen sets for a dozen movies because it has everything: acres of farmland, thick clusters of woods, cities and towns, bridges and houses, red and white, with stone chimneys. There are churches, tall buildings, stretches of coast with sturdy lighthouses with fresh paint, the rocky shoreline, white triangle sails of boats on the water. You could get lost looking at Connecticut.
You wouldn’t notice Wharton right away because it looks like so many small cities, but late summer is its best time, with its rows of marigolds in orange bunches in front yards, the patches of sedum and Limelight hydrangea turning pink by the elementary school. Everyone is out during this time of the year, soaking it all in. It’s almost through; this is almost it. Late August in Wharton is daring green, full blue. Late August is the Firefighters’ Carnival at Woodsen Park, with the snack bar serving hot dogs and hamburgers. Trucks parked in a neat row selling waffles and ice cream and fresh squeezed lemonade. Kids laughing as they try to win goldfish or pull a prize lollipop from the lollipop tree. Adults pushing strollers and stopping to say hello to people they haven’t seen probably since last year’s carnival. “Oh, look at you.” And, wagging a finger, “Hope to see you before next year!” You can hear the clicks of the spinning wheel from one booth or the ding of the penny pitch as the coins hit old glasses and mugs.
If you look, in the open field where the kite club usually flies kites or where the junior high kids play soccer, you’ll see the bright lights on the Ferris wheel and the slick yellow of the potato sack slide or the sea dragon ride for small children creeping in a circle. In the air is the scent of cotton candy and the last of the summer flowers: honeysuckle, roses. The Wharton firefighters are everywhere: volunteering at the dunking booth (“Oh!” as the bench collapses) or holding a spatula while sausages and peppers sizzle on the grill.
Tonight as the cars creep through town, past the Regent Theater, past Let’s Bagel, past the apartment building where Luke Crowley used to live, past the Mildred Vines statue and wishing fountain, past the Garroway & Associates building, past the Wharton Library with its drooping willow trees and green metal benches, there is a certain radiance in Wharton, and everyone who lives there wishes it were always this alive, this sparkling.
Alex and Kay Lionel stroll slowly home from the carnival. Alex looks down at the spot of mustard on his gray Ralph Lauren shirt. He shrugs and smiles and reaches for Kay’s hand. Kay wears a light cotton sweater over her shoulders and holds a caramel apple for later. She always brings something home for later, to delay gratification, and Alex pictures her standing in the kitchen in her white eyelet nightgown with her bathrobe over it tonight, slicing the apple on a white plate and bringing some to him. “What a treat,” she’ll say, and when he thinks of her now, he still thinks of her that day they met in college, so animated and beautiful, such a straight head on her shoulders. When he looks over at her, he smiles because she still looks so much the same as she did fifty years ago. When she takes his hand, he feels in her fingers something that makes him warm and grateful.
At home, his daughter, Iris, is waiting, there for a weekend visit. She wasn’t feeling well tonight, so she and Dave skipped the carnival. He worries that Iris doesn’t sleep enough, that Dave doesn’t seem to know how to help her. Is there always someone to worry about?
He looks down at Kay’s polished nails, a dusty pink, and they walk down Maple Street, toward the neighborhood where the Tylers lived. Alex thinks of Greg for a second, and wishes they could stop by the house. How odd to think of that house being empty: the refrigerator unplugged, the mail forwarded. How odd to know that Greg and Freddie and Addie aren’t inside it, like perfect dolls in a dollhouse.
Greg. Alex thinks of his face—before the illness, during the illness. What a damn fighter.
Kay looks up because there is a rush of movement next to them, and she gasps as a boy darts by them on a bike, barely missing scraping them as he says, “Sorry.” In that second, they release hands, and stare longingly at the boy’s fine hair that bounces as he rides, his small legs and the blue jersey he wears.
Alex puts his hand on Kay’s back as together they watch the boy glide his bike onto the sidewalk ahead of them and pedal, pedal, pedal until he is just a blur. Both of them keep hearing his Sorry echo in their heads. Alex wonders what the boy is rushing toward. He imagines a sweet quiet house with the porch light on and parents who smile when he walks in the door. “I was getting worried,” the boy’s mother will say, and kiss his head.
Iris sleeps in the Lionels’ guest room (she went to bed even though it’s early evening because she can’t sleep when she should sleep) and dreams about one of her clients in the nursing home, who loves to sit at the table and put puzzles together, and all of a sudden, right next to her client, she sees Benny in her dream, the half brother she never met.
His picture is on the wall next to the cuckoo clock in Alex and Kay’s kitchen. She is surprised in her dream, for she knows he is dead, but she reaches out and touches his arm, and says, I’ve always wanted a brother. In truth, she thinks about Benny quite often, and in dreams, those things come out, she supposes. There is Benny, wearing the yellow and blue striped shirt he’s wearing in a photo album she looked at today when her dad and Kay left for the carnival.
“Good news,” Benny says to her, his voice so distinct and unfamiliar, and she wakes and the room spins. She feels a quick rush of dizziness and nausea, takes deep breaths. She sits up in bed and braces herself and wonders about the carnival. She hopes Alex and Kay are having fun. She imagines everyone stopping to talk to them.
“Oh, you’re not coming?” Kay had said earlier.
“I’m not feeling great,” Iris said. And that was half true. She does feel odd, as though at the very, very beginning of a stomach flu, but she might be imagining it. She could have gone. She would have probably been fine.
The whole truth is she can’t stand to think of all the children she’d see there—running around with cotton candy, riding the rides and laughing. The toddlers with sweaty foreheads and tired faces reaching up to be held by their parents.
She thinks about Benny coming to her in the dream. Why did he say good news? She doesn’t believe in messages from the universe, but that dizziness feels like something she remembers, and hope, like a sensation she’d forgotten, warms her for a second. She looks out the open window and sees Dave walking the yard, his hands in his pockets, his thoughtful expression as he checks the Lionels’ birdfeeders and sits down on the small stone bench under a big tree.
Yes, she is late. Yes, she felt similar with Phoebe. Half of her will not allow the feeling of possibility, but the other half has a thousand excited questions. Could it be? Could it possibly be?
She watches Dave outside. His tranquil eyes. His hands folded on his chest. His glasses slipped down to the edge of his nose, his ponytail loose. Dave with the birds and trees around him. His kind face not broken, still believing good things can come. She should get dressed, rush out to meet him, tell him about the dream, about the feeling. Life is always possible, she thinks, and she doesn’t bother to get dressed. She knocks on the window, and he looks up and grins. “I’ll be right out,” she mouths to him, and she hurries out of the room.
Two miles away, Hannah Johnson leans against her new boyfriend, Brandon Giorio, on one of the benches outside the library. She sips her strawberry milkshake from Shake Superior as she reads a book of poems by Sharon Olds, and Brandon nods and sighs the way he always does when he’s lost in something good, as he reads the biography of J. Edgar Hoover. She can feel his breathing against her, and every once in a while, his stomach makes a noise or she adjusts her head and hears a few thumps of his heartbeat.
She sips the sweet shake and revels in the honesty of this woman’s poetry—the boldness. And what they did to you / you did not do to me. She read the other day that Olds once refused to go to a luncheon at the White House to protest a war, and she likes that. She wants to be that brazen. In the last light of the evening, it gets
harder to see, and she slides her bookmark back into place. She reaches up to touch her new pixie cut, her blond hair all one color now, and makes a slurping sound as she finishes the shake. She puts the cup on the ground and settles into Brandon, his familiar smell like sandalwood. Brandon will not want to admit the light is fading, and he’ll keep reading for at least another ten minutes, even if he has to squint, and she will lie against him and close her eyes and open them just in time to see the last blue and pink of the sky.
Now, Suzette walks upstairs to the bedroom she shares with her husband, Damon. In a gray T-shirt and her comfortable jeans, she notices lately that she can no longer feel the tenderness of the fractured rib from where that girl kicked her. That girl who the police found quickly, whose friend Felicia was a runaway from Virginia who was returned home. She wonders about Natalie and where all her anger came from. “Go easy on her,” she said to the cops that day in the hospital, even though Damon said, “Screw her. Let her meet a cellmate who’ll teach her some manners.”
She feels the place where her ribs were sore for so long and remembers her sister Lisa telling her once when Suzette was waiting for a headache to go away that the body notices pain, but not the absence of pain. “That’s why you keep feeling the headache when it hurts, but when it goes back to normal, you don’t even realize it’s gone.” She likes that explanation. She thinks of Lisa every time she hurts and then the hurt disappears.
She crosses her arms and looks out at the mowed expanse of lawn, the thick patch of trees outside her window. These days, she thinks constantly about Owen, the toddler in foster care whose mother has a heroin problem. He has been in foster care since that day in July, and Suzette inquires about him all the time, imagines bringing him here and letting him never feel pain again, letting him run across their backyard and cutting up French toast for him in his high chair. Damon has come around to the idea lately, and she wonders what the process would be like to foster him, wonders if the mother could ever stop doing drugs and if she and Damon would be okay if they had him and then had to lose him. She thinks of pain and the absence of pain and pushing Owen on a swing at the park and letting him climb into their bed every time he had a nightmare. She looks outside, and the moon sits like the bottom of an anchor over the rows of trees.