Cobble Hill

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  “Dr. Conway.” He held out a nicely kempt hand. “At your service.”

  “Oh.” Peaches shook his hand. “I thought it would be a delivery guy, not the doctor himself.”

  He smiled. His teeth were beautiful. “I do everything myself. Otherwise things get… murky.”

  Peaches nodded. There was nothing murky about Dr. Conway. He was a perfect specimen.

  “MS is very difficult to live with,” he continued. “But it’s not you who has it, is it? It’s a friend?” His shirt was very blue and his neat jeans were very white. His silvery gray hair looked like it had just been cut. Dr. Conway was a silver fox.

  “Yes, a friend,” Peaches responded nervously. She reached into her windbreaker pocket for her wallet. “Thanks for coming so fast. I’ve never done this before.”

  “Is she degenerating? I just want to be sure I’m giving you the best fit.”

  Peaches sipped her beer. Stuart had said Mandy was getting worse. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

  He nodded and pointed beneath the bar. A small, benign brown paper bag hung from one of the hooks meant for stashing your purse. “I think that will provide the necessary lift. And if your friend prefers not to smoke it, there’s also a method of making butter with it, to put on toast or bake brownies or cookies with or what have you, that works extremely well. There’s a lotion too I can provide if needed. It’s from Greece.”

  “Okay, great.” Peaches retrieved her credit card and slid it across the bar. He produced his phone, swiped the card through the credit card attachment, and handed it to her to sign with her finger.

  A text message appeared on her phone. Cobble Hill General. For services rendered. $350.

  And that was that, transaction complete.

  “I better go rescue my dog. Thanks so much.” She retrieved the bag and stood up. “This was so much more civilized than I expected it to be.”

  Dr. Conway smiled, his teeth gleaming and white. “I aim to please. Please be in touch whenever the need arises.”

  Peaches giggled. She had a drug dealer now! “Oh, believe me, I will.”

  Chapter 5

  “Hey, so I have this idea.” Stuart placed a small brown shopping bag on the kitchen table. He’d picked it up from Peaches’ office that afternoon. “I think you should try smoking some weed.”

  “Stu. You know how I get.” Mandy crossed her arms over her chest. “You think I’m a nightmare now.”

  “You’re not a nightmare. Besides, this is medical marijuana.” Stuart removed the quaint glass jam jar from inside the bag. The jar was stuffed with dull green marijuana buds. He unscrewed the metal lid and took a whiff. “Wow.”

  “Stu, please.”

  Pot had always caused Mandy to act severely stupid and overly paranoid, the kind of high everyone hated. Once, in high school, after she and a bunch of other girls had shared a joint in a PE storage closet, she’d burst into the middle of a dress rehearsal for the musical Cats wielding a hockey stick and hissing at all the theater kids in their furry cat suits. She also always craved Fritos when she was high—bags and bags of Fritos—and she was already so fat. Medical weed was probably different though. You could tailor the high to your medical needs. But she didn’t have any medical needs, because she didn’t actually have MS.

  Maybe there was some kind of skinny weed, weed that would give her energy instead of Frito cravings, weed that would get her out of bed. Stu would love that. Teddy would love that.

  Stuart brought the jar over to the bed and sad down beside her. He held it out for her to sniff.

  “Whoa. It’s so strong.”

  “The nurse said you can make butter with it if you don’t want to smoke it.”

  “What nurse?”

  It might be wise not to reveal that Ted’s school nurse had been the one to procure the pot. “Oh, just someone Robbie hooked me up with. You know Robbie.” Stuart sniffed the jar again. “I’ll smoke it with you,” he offered. “After Ted goes to bed.”

  The idea of getting stoned together like teenagers was pretty cute. They could sit on the stoop—if she could make it to the stoop—and have their own little private party. Let the neighbors gossip. Worst thing that could happen: she’d get super paranoid and admit her lie. Which would actually be a huge relief.

  “Sure. Okay. I’ll try it,” she said bravely.

  * * *

  Late afternoon light filtered prettily through the linen library curtains. Roy licked the toast crumbs from his upper lip and stared at his laptop screen, hating himself. What in bloody sweet hell was he going on about? Teenagers living on bloody Mars under surveillance with rationed ice cream. Everything he knew about space came from watching Battlestar Galactica back in 1979. His own teen years were a smelly, distant riot of drinking too much lager, smoking too many cigarettes, pissing in the rain, and unrequited crushes on beautiful older girls. But for some reason, ever since he’d begun Gold or Red or whatever bloody title the damned book was going to have, he kept coming up with teenagers. The girl hiding the family gold in the sand with a shovel, and now this space dust–induced spark between a boy and a girl with annoying names—Ceran and Bettina—and no acne because there was no humidity or bacteria or pollution on Mars, which he absolutely did not know for a fact, he was just guessing. What was he thinking? That as he typed all this gibberish into his laptop something brilliant would begin to blossom, like one of Einstein’s theories or da Vinci’s drawings? It might seem crazy and farfetched now, but once he got to the very end, four hundred or so pages later, it would all be so hilariously clear he’d wonder why he’d ever doubted himself?

  Perhaps he was having a midlife crisis. Instead of buying a Porsche or having an affair with his personal trainer he was writing an insane, unreadable novel.

  Roy thought he ought to talk to someone about it. This was forever his conundrum. Many writers had reading groups where they discussed their work with other writers and workshopped one another’s drafts. Some writers had a dedicated, trusted reader, like Stephen King’s wife, Tabitha. Some writers had editors who held their hands along the way. The Great Gatsby, for instance, would have been double the size and extremely convoluted and wordy had F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins, not demanded merciless cuts.

  Wendy would be honored if Roy asked her to be his reader. But she was a magazine person, used to fitting columns on a page with eye-catching headlines and sexy photographs. Very quickly she would become impatient with herself for not knowing how to shape his pubescent ditherings into a Roy Clarke novel unlike any that had come before, and would take her impatience with herself out on him.

  His brilliant young agent was no use to him either. She had gotten married and had two babies since being assigned to Roy and was clever enough to take on fewer and fewer novels and more and more celebrity cookbooks. Roy had recently received a vivacious company email thrillingly announcing the forthcoming Dining In with the Duchess of Cambridge, which would most likely be a gigantic hit.

  He stared at his laptop screen, muttering, “A stranger comes to town or a hero goes on a journey,” the old adage adapted from something Tolstoy once said. Isabel, the Bahamas girl, was the stranger. She appears on Mars and needs to hide her gold. Perhaps she’s the daughter of some Elon Musk–type billionaire genius who funded the Mars colonization program, which is now bankrupt. There’s no money to bring anyone back, they’re stranded. Somehow, though, Isabel and the two horny space-station dwellers, Ceran and Bettina (whose names are so annoying they were probably kicked off Earth), figure out how to get themselves and the gold back to Earth, while Ceran, ever the romantic, struggles with being in love with both girls at the same time. Eventually all three return to Isabel’s family compound in the Bahamas to live forever in sin and bliss.

  Roy hit return and stared at his screen some more.

  He did like teenagers. Shy was endlessly amusing. And so was space, although he really knew nothing about it. He clicked on his search engine and typed in “Life on Mars.”<
br />
  * * *

  “I really don’t need a tutor,” Shy told Liam when they met in the empty art room at the appointed time. “I just need to pay attention in algebra. Mr. Streko posted a Latin quote on his Twitter about absurd things. To me, math is absurd. That’s why we have calculators.”

  Liam had a habit of blurting out the thing he most wanted not to blurt out. “ ‘I carry your heart with me…’ ” he began, quoting the e. e. cummings poem he’d just read in AP Lit, looking askance at the paintings that had been left to dry on one of the art tables because he still could not look at her. He attempted to translate the next part into Latin. “ ‘Ego autem in corde meo portare?’ ”

  Shy stared at him and then giggled. It was the best response he could have hoped for.

  “Sorry. I think I might have Asperger’s,” he mumbled at the art table. “Well, not officially, but after reading all her nursing textbooks, my mom and I decided I’m probably on the low end of the spectrum. I’m weirdly good at school and weirdly bad at everything else, so.”

  “Are you saying ‘ass burgers’?” Shy asked, and Liam was grateful. Maybe it was only in the United States that Asperger’s was a household blanket term used for weirdos who did well in school. English people were more forgiving. Probably all the great English talents had Asperger’s. Peter Sellers, the whole Monty Python cast, Harry Potter. Shy herself was probably on the spectrum, which was why they were already getting along.

  “Are you really going to tutor me, or can we just pretend to do math and talk about other stuff?”

  Liam pointed at her Gucci sneakers, which were white leather with little bees in between the red, green, and black leather stripes. “Those are why no girl here ever talks to you. You know that, right?”

  There, he’d done it again. What was wrong with him?

  Shy looked down at her shoes. “My mom got them for free. She works for a magazine. Also, it’s ironic. I mean, look at the way I dress. These are boys’ jeans because my legs look weird in girls’ ones and my dad’s undershirt that he shrank by accident that I cut so it’s cropped.”

  “Well,” Liam said, keeping his eyes on her shoes. “They’re still alienating. If you were a guy you’d probably get beaten up.”

  “But this is a rich-person school, right? I mean, I get that feeling.” Shy only said this because her mother seemed to have chosen the snobbiest school in Brooklyn, probably because she thought it was the best.

  “I guess. I go here for free because my dad teaches music to the little kids.”

  Shy nodded. That was sweet but also a bit sad.

  “And my mom used to be the nurse. She just changed to a public elementary school because they pay better, ironically. But you’re right,” Liam said. “For spring break and Christmas and summer and stuff everyone goes to like, Vail or Martinique. My family goes camping in the Berkshires or to Rockaway Beach.”

  Shy had no clue about those places, but she agreed with him anyway.

  “See? I bet they have all kinds of Gucci stuff, they just don’t wear it to school. If you like something, why not wear it all the time? If it makes you happy. I used to have this leather jacket from Paris that—” She stopped. She sounded even more spoiled than the Martinique spring break kids.

  Liam pulled up a chair and yanked a pad of graph paper and his calculator out of his backpack. “So. Algebra. Can I see your homework?”

  Shy flipped open her binder and sighed enormously. “Please be nice to me?”

  Liam chuckled into the buttons on his calculator, promising himself he wouldn’t do something awful like spell out I LOVE YOU backward in numbers and then flip the calculator so she could read the words on the tiny screen.

  He looked up, blushing. Shy was staring right at him. He forced himself not to look away. “I’ll be nice.”

  * * *

  “How ’bout we smoke some of that weed tonight?” Stuart suggested after they’d eaten tortellini and garlic bread on the big bed and he’d read Harry Potter to Ted and piggybacked him to his room. He sat at Mandy’s blanketed feet and shook the jam jar.

  Mandy pressed pause on her iPad and sat up against the pile of pillows. She’d just started a new anorexia movie on Lifetime. “Now?”

  “Let’s get wasted,” Stuart said, tossing the jar into her lap.

  “Shhsh.” Mandy giggled.

  She held the jar up to the light. It certainly didn’t look like the pot she’d smoked in high school, which was brown and clumpy and unappealing. This pot grew in fuzzy, forest-green whorls, pretty enough to decorate a sweater with. There was a little white label on the jar with the words PURPLE HAZE written in purple calligraphy.

  “I got this, too.” Stuart retrieved the little purple pipe he’d bought at a shop on Atlantic Avenue on his way home. It had a USB port and released vapor, not smoke. The guy at the store had showed him how to use it. Smoking a joint was still probably more fun, but this was how everyone smoked now. He was excited to try it. “Why don’t I get it set up and we can go down to the stoop?”

  “The stoop?” Mandy hadn’t sat on the stoop since June. She hadn’t left the house in a week. More than that maybe—she’d lost count.

  “Yeah, come on. It’ll be fun.” Stuart walked around to her side of the bed, took the jar out of her hands, opened it up, and sniffed it. “How can you resist?”

  Mandy folded her arms over her chest. “I can’t,” she said, more worried about getting out of bed with Stuart watching than smoking the pot. Her legs probably had a diamond-shaped pattern on them from the mattress.

  “You can. Come on. I’m going to do this over the kitchen counter in case I drop some. Then we can sprinkle it on our toast in the morning.”

  As soon as his back was turned, Mandy heaved her legs out of bed and pushed herself to a stand.

  “You need help?” Stuart called out.

  “Nope. I got it.” At least her yellow T-shirt was big. And her black cutoff sweats hid most of her legs except her calves and ankles, which were huge. “I better put on a bra, in case the neighbors see us,” she added and thudded as gracefully as she could into their bedroom. Her bras had been put away neatly, untouched for months. She chose a black lacy one because this felt like a date, like in the old days, before she supposedly came down with MS.

  “All set?” Stuart leaned in the bedroom doorway, the purple pipe dangling from his lips. “Let’s go.”

  It was a straight shot through the living room and out the front door. Mandy hovered on the top step of the stoop and clutched the railing. “Whoa.”

  Stuart took her hand and helped her down the four steps to the middle of the stoop.

  “This is good, right?” Mandy stopped and clutched his hand as she lowered her bottom down, already slightly out of breath. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You have MS,” Stuart answered gently.

  Mandy took a deep breath and patted the step beside her. “Come. Sit.”

  Stuart sat and handed her the pipe. “Take a hit.”

  Mandy glanced around. The street was quiet. A taxi rumbled by. The air was dull and still. It would probably rain. “Shouldn’t we be worried about people seeing us and smelling it?”

  Stuart scooted close and put his arm around her. “No one cares what we do anymore.”

  That was sad, but probably true.

  “So I just suck on it?”

  “Yup.”

  She held the pipe to her lips and took a hit. It tasted sweet and warm and almost grapey. She held the hit in her lungs for as long as she could before blowing out the vapor in a thin stream. “This thing is great,” she said, examining the pipe. No leaves in your mouth, no burning paper, no matches. “I love it.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  She laughed and held it out for Stuart to try. He took an enormous hit and blew a few perfect smoke rings, showing off. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

  “More?”

  “Yes, please.”

  They passed the pipe back and fo
rth, settling into the pleasantness. The clouds cleared. Stars were beginning to come out. Smoke curled from a lone chimney across the street. A woman in a black hoodie and sunglasses hurried by with her tiny white dog.

  “Do you feel it?” Mandy asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  Their perch on the steps felt a little precarious. She braced herself against Stuart’s strong, skinny arm. “I hope we don’t fall.”

  He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. “We won’t fall.”

  * * *

  Big Boy looked forward to his nightly walk with the family. The enormous mutt was old, a year older than Liam, and these days he walked extremely slowly. They went at night, after dinner, because it was cooler then. It was nice, walking the dog together as a family. Sometimes Peaches walked between Greg and Liam, holding both their hands, feeling truly content.

  Tonight the moon was full, the air crisp with the onset of fall and sweetened by the smoke from lit fireplaces. Peaches tried to take Liam’s hand but he was looking at his feet, his hands jammed into the pockets of his hoodie.

  “Greg, has Liam told you about the girl he’s tutoring? She’s Roy Clarke’s daughter.”

  “Her name is Shy,” Liam said. “Shy Clarke.”

  “She sounds like a comic book character,” Greg observed.

  Peaches laughed. “Totally.”

  Liam glared at them. “Maybe she’s faking being bad at math because she’s really an evil nuclear weapons specialist about to take over the planet.”

  “It’s possible.” Greg chuckled, and for the thousandth time Peaches marveled at the fact that she’d married someone even less mature than she was. Greg was happiest when watching old Bill Murray comedies like Groundhog Day or Caddyshack, winning at Connect Four, or figuring out how to teach his kindergarten students the words to totally inappropriate songs like “Fight the Power” and “Margaritaville.”

  Their nighttime walks usually followed the same circuit: over the Gowanus Canal bridge on Union Street, down to Clinton Street and over to Cobble Hill Park, up Henry Street to Kane, past the schoolyard of Peaches’ school to Court Street, on to Union Street and then home. Sometimes Big Boy caught a scent and took a detour. Tonight, he decided to veer backward on Kane Street. He stopped at the corner of Kane and Strong Place, peed on the neatly landscaped bushes outside the pretty brick house on the corner, did an about-face, and shuffled on.