Leaning his head against the back of the chair, he waited for the light-headedness to pass. He didn’t feel he had enough of a self to talk to other people—to smile, to pour a drink—without ripping in two.
The guest bedroom looked out onto the driveway. Pieter crossed silently to the window and pushed it open. Sitting on the sill, pain flickering between his shoulder blades, he awkwardly pivoted his legs out. The ground was only a foot or so beneath his shoes; all he had to do was stand up to walk away.
“Avez-vous la période?”
“What?” Angie said. She and Tris were crouching in the woods to pee. She wasn’t supposed to have beer with her meds, but it calmed her down. She might have drunk too fast, though. Time kept skipping.
She’d decided, finally, that she just wouldn’t apply anywhere that had a January first date. The applications weren’t that hard; she could surely get the January fifteenth ones in.
“Do you have your period?” Tris said. She gestured toward Angie’s lap, where the creased edge of a pad showed.
Angie stood quickly, pulling up her pants, embarrassed. She’d begun wearing a pad all the time because she was afraid she could get her period and not realize it right away. They made their way back into the Burnt House, up the wide curving staircase. The bathtub held bottles of beer.
“I feel kind of dizzy.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink, with your period and all.”
“Oh, shit,” Angie said, and put her hand out for the counter. The bathroom walls were graffitied with black marker, a hole punched into the wall labeled Daniela Moore’s cunt→. Her vision went dark at the edges, like burning paper. For a moment she thought she’d throw up; then it retreated. “No, I’m okay. I’m okay.”
She could hear that someone had started a contest downstairs, throwing bottles out the missing wall to crash against trees.
Sounding like Jess—voice dipping low with concern—Tris asked, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine! I keep saying I’m fine.”
Jordana waited for Pieter to come out of the guest room. It had been twenty minutes, then thirty. Finally, she went after him. His cello case stood in the corner; his tux hung neatly over the footboard of the bed.
“Where is he?” Beth asked, when she came out.
“I don’t know. His cello’s here, so he must be. He’s walking or something.”
Jordana let herself out the door of Stephen and Beth’s house, into the shattering cold, and walked up and down the block, wider and wider circles. Her husband’s car was nowhere. Pieter would never leave without his cello, but he had.
She stood, letting it sink in. Then, bending her head, arms crossed over her chest, she began walking swiftly, without destination. Gradually the houses gave way to stores. The blocks became longer; she was walking parallel to Route 121, moving toward the commercial part of town. She passed the backs of buildings she drove by every day, and then she passed the back of the bank building that held the clinic.
Donut Haus smelled of sugar and Clorox. There were no customers. A woman, pink skirt pulled tight across her hips, leaned over a bucket of gray water, wringing out a mop.
“I wonder if I could get some coffee.” Jordana put a dollar on the counter.
The mopper stood up slowly and turned. She was pregnant and very young. Her gold pin said lauretta. “Where you are, I just mopped there.”
“Sorry.” Jordana stepped back.
“I already closed out the register.”
Jordana had only come in because the little store had been right there, and lit, and empty. She hadn’t really wanted coffee and so was shocked to find herself close to tears. “Is there any way—?”
“You can have it if you want it that bad.” The girl leaned the mop against the wall and, skirting the wet floor, came around back of the counter. Above her was a clock with WHAT TIME IS IT? written across the face, and D·O·U·G·H·N·U·T·T·I·M·E· in a circle instead of numbers. Lauretta picked up the coffeepot and sniffed, then shrugged and poured a mug. “Just don’t tell my boss.”
It was warm in Donut Haus; Jordana put her cheek down on the counter. The store’s wide front window reflected them: the pregnant girl in the pink uniform, Jordana dark and pinched, still wearing a long white apron. Steam rose from the mop bucket, breaking apart in the air. The clock hands hovered just before the d, then clicked forward. Midnight.
Pieter pulled into the driveway of his house and turned off the ignition.
There was something pathetic about the pull of home for him; it only occurred to him now that he might have gone somewhere else, might have gone anywhere. Now that he was here, he couldn’t imagine going inside. He grasped the steering wheel with both hands, pulling himself forward. He wanted to scream, and hated that he couldn’t bring himself to, and the pain of that—his decorum and absurdity—did make him scream.
At the Burnt House, they screamed the last seconds of the year: “Three! Two! One!”
Luke pulled Khamisa to him and kissed her. Then to be nice, he kissed Kristin, who was standing right by his elbow. Her lips were very soft and she tasted of mint gum. He touched the tip of her tongue with his. She gave a little moan and he realized what he was doing.
He pulled back quickly, looking for Khamisa, who—thank God—was turned away to hug a friend. Around them people shouted; champagne bottles popped.
Afterward, people still yelled, trying to keep the moment going. Khamisa kissed Cole on the lips.
“Where’s Ange?” Luke asked Jess.
She looked around, then nodded toward the stairs. Angie stood at the edge of the top step, next to Tris. Even from here, Angie looked pale. She swayed, put her hand out for the banister. He started toward her, smiling at the girls who stopped him to kiss his cheek. He wasn’t quite to the stairs when Kristin grasped his shoulder. She had what looked like angry tears in her eyes.
“What the fuck was that?” she asked.
At the top of the staircase, his sister folded up and began to fall.
She fell with stoned slowness, end over end like flip turns, the jarring thuds of her shoulder, her feet, her head. Luke shook Kristien off and bounded up three stairs. He tried to catch his sister but her weight knocked him over and they slid down the last steps, tangled together.
Angie sobbed. No, she was laughing. Her hair had a line of blood in it. She raised herself to her hands and knees, laughing and crying, then fell onto her side. Mascara streaked her face, and her jeans had ripped at the knee. Through the hole he could see her kneecap. He put his hand there, over the rip. The warm arch of his sister’s knee fit his palm. Angie stilled, blue eyes enormous, and in the long moment before he looked away and the noise of the world returned, he felt himself falling, as she had, end over end.
Thirteen
The ice of the river was wavy, and in places weeds had frozen into it, dark warping of the surface from beneath. Pieter had learned to skate so young, on the canals near his boyhood home in Haarlem, that he couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t known how. The Morrill River narrowed here, this short stretch almost like a pond. It was midafternoon but overcast: sky dark gray, air heavy. In the middle of the river, the ice shadowed to lavender.
It was their family’s tradition to skate here on New Year’s Day. He hadn’t wanted to come, but he hadn’t been able to think of anything he could stand to do at home, either. Now he wished he’d stayed behind.
He skated to the edge of the ice, where the Girl Scout troop had set up a card table to sell hot drinks; a Magic-Markered sign said help us in orange, with purple smiley faces. One Girl Scout, maybe thirteen, had thick glasses and wore her green sash over her parka. Behind her, two other Scouts, much younger, sat whispering together on a Styrofoam ice chest. He felt sorry for the older girl, officious and uncool, her forehead breaking out. As she handed Pieter his hot chocolate, it slopped a little over the cup edge and onto his rabbit-lined glove.
The chocolate had a dry artificial taste, but its w
armth felt good. He turned to watch the skaters. His wife was easy to pick out. She hadn’t learned to skate until adulthood, and she did it slowly and with concentration, staying close to the ice’s edge. Angie and Luke were skating together, racing and deliberately bumping into each other. Strange to see them enjoy each other’s company.
There was something about Angie’s face. He skated closer and took her chin, turning her face so the cheekbone caught the light: a bruise and, up near the hairline, a cut. “What’s this?”
Angie glanced at Luke.
He said, “The party last night? Mandy’s mom had just mopped their kitchen. Lots of people slipped.”
“You slipped?”
She nodded.
“You know, you’re not supposed to drink with your meds.”
Luke said, “She wasn’t,” and threw himself back into their game of pushing.
When his kids were in junior high, they used to spend Saturdays at the skating rink downtown. Pieter would pick them up as a last errand, after the hardware store, after buying stamps at the post office, dropping his concert shirts at the cleaners. Driving toward the rink, those late winter afternoons, the dark trees had seemed to hold the last of the old light against the sky.
And then he’d park and walk into the rink, every time the same song, or so it seemed, someone singing they wished that they had Jesse’s girl, lights flashing magenta and yellow and blue across the ice, Angie skating with a boy who came up to her shoulder and had perfectly feathered hair. Black rubber mats squeaking under Pieter’s hard-soled shoes, the air smelling of pizza. The rink was over-bright and tacky. It seemed to him, now, that he’d had everything.
A few yards away, his wife relaxed and unlocked her knees. Then, as though noticing her ease, she froze and crashed.
He slowed his stride, keeping his eye on her. She was no longer seeing Ben Webster, but did that make her all the more likely to pine for him? Did she have to hide her longing from Pieter, pretend it didn’t exist? The idea seemed more terrible than the affair itself. Jordana put her mittened hands on the ice and tried to push herself to her feet, but her skates skittered and she fell to her knees again. Angie skated over and hoisted her up. Despite Angie being wider and fair, they looked alike to him: not in the way of mothers and daughters but more the way old married couples sometimes came to resemble each other. As they passed him, Angie reached back for Pieter. He let her pull him for a few yards, then smiled weakly and extricated his hand. “I’m going to rest awhile.”
He made for a bench at the edge of the river, passing an older couple waltzing without music and then a high school couple who had stopped skating and were just standing on the ice, holding on to each other. And then, standing under a tree: the girl from the yard.
It was her shape he recognized more than her features. She hunched in the cold, hands under her arms. Her aloneness seemed terrible.
He looked back, to where she was looking. Luke had joined Jordana and Angie, grabbing Jordana’s other hand, helping to pull her across the ice. They wore heavy jackets, bright hats. Laughter floated through the cold air. The three of them looked like a family, a happy family.
Part Two
Fourteen
The summer before his senior year of college, Luke bought his first car, a blue ’78 Datsun. It had been through too many Wisconsin winters: along the fender, salt had corroded a ragged gray coastline into the paint. The man selling it, Roger, had a broad sunburnt face and a yellow mustache. He’d duct-taped squares of heavy cardboard over two holes where the floor was rusted through. A sleek cream-colored cat snaked a figure eight, over and over, between and around the guy’s ankles, its tail whispering against the stiff denim of his jeans.
“We have a Siamese at home,” Luke said, glad at this point of connection. He needed Roger to go down on the Datsun’s price. “My sister rescued it from a breeding factory.”
“I don’t think anyone’s going to try to breed this lady.” Bending down, the man scooped up the cat. He held her under the armpits, so that she faced Luke, the rest of her body hanging down. The cat was blind, eyes a cloudy eggnog-white. Roger began to swing her slowly side to side, a heavy pendulum. Lazily, she closed her eyes, tongue flicking out once to lick her nose.
Luke had already driven the car around the block a few times. The clutch felt smooth; the noises from the engine were loud but not alarmingly irregular. He liked the car’s compactness. The others he’d looked at had been low and lurking, with the long snouts and round eyes of alligators.
“Seven hundred’s a lot of money,” said Luke. He was lifeguarding at the Nat for the summer, making minimum wage. Nine hundred in his checking account, and he hadn’t paid last month’s bills yet. His phone bill, in particular, was depressingly high.
Something in Roger’s face shut down. “That clutch isn’t even a year old. That cost me five hundred bucks, alone. I’ve got the receipt.” Handing the cat to Luke, he turned and went into the house.
After a moment’s shock, the cat began to squirm. Luke gripped harder, but with a yowl the cat corkscrewed herself out of his hands. Dropping to the pavement, she tore around the corner of the house.
Roger reemerged a few minutes later with a pink carbon copy. “It’s a little torn,” he said.
“Your cat wanted to get down.”
Roger thrust the carbon paper at Luke—“It’s a little torn,” he said again, “no big deal”—and crouched down, calling, “Pretty? Pretty?”
The receipt showed the clutch had been replaced for $423. The upper right corner was ripped, where the repair date should have been.
Still squatting, Roger shuffled forward a few steps, crooning, “Here, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty.”
Luke wished the clutch hadn’t come up—he hadn’t even been worried about its age before. He wanted the car. Driving it, shifting from second gear up to third, he’d felt incredibly happy. He liked the car better for being unpretentious, for having vinyl seats and a ceiling so low it brushed the top of his hair. The gearshift knob had been replaced with a devil’s head whose eyes lit up when he braked.
Roger had coaxed the cat out; it curled around the brick corner of the house, meowing resentfully. Scooping her up, he stood and turned to Luke. “I should get a better filing system.”
“It’s fine,” Luke said quickly. “I’ll take it.”
* * *
Down the street was a pay phone, between the gas station and IHOP. Luke tried Angie, letting the phone at the halfway house ring and ring. He kicked at some pale weeds that grew through cracks in the concrete. Finally, after twenty-three rings, he hung up.
The night she’d fallen down the stairs at the Burnt House, almost four years ago, he’d gotten it—really gotten it, for the first time—that she wasn’t faking. It was like that optical illusion where you saw an old woman and then realized the picture could be a young woman as well: a tiny shift, but it had rearranged everything.
He’d helped get Angie through the last semester of high school, making her do her homework, talking her out of bed when she was too depressed to move, lying to their parents. He hadn’t realized how aimless he’d felt before—that was part of why he did it, and part was guilt. But he also found he just liked being around his sister. She had a wry sense of humor, a funny off-center way of looking at the world. By the end of summer, she’d been more stable; she’d made it through seven months at Middlebury College before overdosing on lithium and being hospitalized. She lived at home, then a group house, then home. She stabilized and got jobs, went off her medication and lost them. Off meds, she picked up men she didn’t know, gave all her money to panhandlers, bought extravagant and senseless presents, destroyed possessions, went back to the hospital. But she’d been doing well these last few months, sticking to her therapy schedule, working as a cook. She even talked about returning to college, maybe UNH this time.
He tried calling her one more time, then gave up and drove to Wendy’s.
Nine A.M. The lawns were green and
shady, and from all around came the high chant of insects. He loved driving, even on these short, slow streets. His housemate had a Honda Civic that Luke occasionally took to the grocery store or a movie, but it felt different to be in his own car. Wendy lived in a big gray house on Gorham. He pulled into the side driveway, under the chestnut. The house had once been a mansion but was now divided into many small apartments; there was a perpetual red and white for rent sign jammed crookedly into the front lawn.
He let himself into the building, then into Wendy’s apartment, which took up the right side of the first floor. He called out, and Wendy called back, “Kitchen.”
The air smelled of frying butter. The apartment was smaller than Luke’s place, which he only shared with two people. Here Wendy and another girl had the dining room, and four other roommates split the two bedrooms. There were high ceilings and elaborate moldings around the windows and stained brown carpet covering the floor. During the school year, the space always felt chaotic—ringing phone, dishes on the table, rinsed-out underwear hanging over the shower rod—but most of the housemates had gone home for the summer, and now the apartment felt airy and quiet.
When he came into the kitchen, Wendy glanced over her shoulder and smiled. She was barefoot, her dark red hair pulled back in a neat knot. They’d been together two years but he still hadn’t gotten used to how different she looked at different times. Sometimes at night, when he unfastened her hair from its bun, she was ethereally beautiful. Other times, she seemed plain, with her pale lashes and wide forehead and freckles everywhere. Wendy should have been a senior like he was, but she’d spent her first year in Madison waitressing, to qualify for residency and in-state tuition.
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