“Rosette? It’s me, Karen. I need you. It’s a real emergency this time. I’m dying.”
MANY PEOPLE SUBSCRIBED to the once-a-decade Last Day apology, including Kurt’s own father, who believed that anything more than that was excessive and prideful. Though Kurt’s father also thought painting the family’s last name on their mailbox was excessive and prideful. Kurt remembered going on a Last Day drive with his father when he was still a boy so that his dad could make amends to a former colleague. The old friend lived in his mother’s basement, Kurt’s father explained, and without a word more Kurt understood that this was a shameful state of being.
“I’ve owed him this money for ten years,” his dad said on the drive down, “but I didn’t think it mattered. He’d just blow it at the tracks. I thought I was sparing him the trouble a wad of cash would cause. But fair is fair, and when you owe someone money, you pay it back, no matter what a son of a bitch that person is.”
It was a rare moment of mercy in an otherwise relentless life. Kurt wondered whether, if his father had lived longer, the old man would have made amends to his son one day, too. Kurt was the spitting image of his father, a genetic jackpot closer to a psychic spittoon, as Kurt was the target of all his father’s bile. They had the same square face, the same light brown eyes, the same sour stomach. Their little league stats were a weapon of comparison, which his father trotted out often, almost daily, as though meaningful. Kurt had been a decent outfielder but the old man’s pitching bested the son’s squarely. That Kurt’s batting average was slightly higher was a point seldom made, not after Kurt realized that making it caused the whole family, especially his mother, to suffer come the first drink at nightfall.
But gravity is one of the great miracle workers, softening even the most obdurate in old age, and perhaps, Kurt speculated, his old man’s persistent scrutiny and unforgiving appraisal of everyone, especially his son, would have broken down over time as his body did. In time, if he had lived, Kurt’s old man might have mellowed into a tolerable guy. It used to bother Kurt, all the acid his dad spat so expertly into his eyes; then one night while still in prison, after suffering the requisite abuse of the day with the stoicism that was another of his father’s genetic gifts, he figured it out—Dad hates me because he thinks I am him—and he never took the old man’s vitriol personally again.
Kurt kept his distance from then on, noticing from afar that once his father had lost his son as a punching bag, he began to push away first Kurt’s older sister, then the younger, the baby of the family, who had always been Daddy’s girl. When the first grandchild was expected, the old man had a last surge of bitterness. Kurt’s older sister had married a Pakistani man, a Hindu, a religion their father could not differentiate from Islam, which he could not defuse from a primatological alarm system that sounded “Threat!” despite all logical arguments to the contrary. He refused to allow his wife to host the baby shower at their house and he grumbled unintelligibly when friends congratulated him on the new grandchild. It looked like things were beginning to relent as the grandbaby, a boy, grew up and showed an interest in backyard baseball. Then his father dropped dead at fifty-seven of an aortic aneurysm, and there was nothing left to say.
At forty-two, Kurt had never made amends to anyone in his life. From every angle, the tradition appeared to him as supremely selfish, a conversation that dredged up a painful or forgotten or wished-to-be-forgotten past in the hope of relieving the perpetrator of the burden of guilt at the expense of the victim. The few amends he’d received had followed this pattern. Megan Brown’s amends had been more like a one-woman show without a stage. Another former girlfriend had written to him apologizing for the way she’d used her affair with Kurt to get revenge on her husband. Kurt hadn’t even known that she was married at the time. Not that he would have cared. It was just a pebble of information he could have done without. Another woman had approached him at a crowded Indian restaurant hosting an early morning all-you-can-eat Last Day buffet. She was drunk and spilling her plate of chicken saag on the floor. He didn’t recognize her at first until she announced in her inebriated, too-loud, South Boston bray (that voice he could not forget), “I made your, uh, your dysfunctions all about me. It’s clearly the cancer, or stuff that happened in prison, or whatever. Not your fault, not mine. But I’m sorry.” Kurt bought her a beer and sent her back to her table of delusional, supportive female friends, all of them hungover or still drunk from the night before.
Kurt was freely able to admit that he’d been a bastard to certain women he’d slept with, but he was an honest bastard, and so any hurt they still felt was their morbid toy to play with. With his male friends he was quick to back away from a fight before it even started. His sisters loved him in their distant, emotionally convenient way, and he loved them back when circumstance (their father’s funeral) or calendar (Thanksgiving dinner) demanded it. To force anything more out of these relationships would be dishonest, as all the past harms—that time he knowingly left the gas tank on empty when his sister had a soccer tournament to get to, the broken promise to pay back that now trivial sum of money—had been ironed out of time by many more small acts of unspoken kindness. It was not his family’s way to talk critically about their actions, let alone their feelings, and to foist such a conversation onto his sisters, merely because of a kitschy holiday, would be unfair. His mother was in Florida now with her new husband. She was enjoying a warmth of climate and companionship she had never gotten in the first half of her life, and the best amends Kurt could make to her was to be happy for her.
His entire relationship with Sarah Clark-Davenport had been a perverted amends to Mary; further proof, he thought years after he’d extricated himself from that shitshow, that the whole institution of reparations was faulty at its core. And yet, now that Mary’s ashes and everything else attached to her were no longer under his bed, he felt freer than he had ever known possible.
“I’ve never made amends on Last Day,” Kurt said to Sarah Moss as they pushed a grocery cart around a supermarket. “I mean, ever. In my life.” Clouds of mist sprayed intermittently on the slanted stacks of apples. “It’s incredible. There’s like a runner’s high, or something, that comes along with it. I finally get why people do this. Do you have any amends you want to make?”
“No,” Sarah said.
“I’ll drive you anywhere. I’m serious. I want you to have this experience.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and guided the direction of the cart she was pushing. “What am I saying? You’re too young to have hurt anyone. Too sweet.” He gave her shoulder a little squeeze, then bounded across the aisle to grab some oranges.
It was a long ride to the beach. The sky was a vapid shade of blue full of lumpy metastasizing clouds. Behind them the sun was setting in all its tacky grandiosity. Sarah refused to look at it. She hated that she had to hold Kurt’s body now, that she had to synchronize with his every lean and sway. Motorcycles were stupid. Dead Mary was stupid. Sarah, sister of dead Mary, was stupid. The idea that Kurt had had sexual intercourse with other people ignited nothing inside her, but that he could love someone as clearly as he loved this evil harpy Sarah was the absolute stupidest thing in the world.
“What’s wrong?” Kurt asked her after they parked at the beach. She pulled off her helmet and revealed a scowl.
“Nothing.”
Nothing. That little two-syllable word coming from the lips of a silent, brooding woman was the grenade of all pronouns. Kurt had heard its lethal frequency a thousand times before. It didn’t matter how old or young or pretty or ugly or proud or insecure they were. Women always wanted to fight. He assumed they were born that way.
A vendor in the parking lot was selling cords of firewood at a criminal markup, five dollars extra for cords of driftwood, for the Last Day bonfires. Kurt bought two bundles and trudged over the dunes toward the beach.
A long row of shoes had been left at the entran
ce to the boardwalk by dozens of other holiday revelers. It was considered good luck to walk barefoot on the beach on May 27, and many people left their shoes behind in a show of solidarity. If the world did not end, Sarah knew, her shoes would still be there tomorrow. Yet she couldn’t help feeling apprehensive about this tradition. She’d had this particular pair of sneakers for years, they’d been through a lot together, and here they were, getting abandoned moments before the world ended. Maybe she should burn them? But then what if things turned out fine? She’d have to ride Kurt’s motorcycle with bare feet.
She held her sneakers close against her chest and followed Kurt’s path in the sand.
“If it were possible to divorce myself, I would,” Sarah grumbled.
A woman with a magnificent Afro overheard this and laughed. She was crafting a photograph of all the shoes with a very large professional-looking camera. She was dressed in a lot of wheat-colored linen separates cut on a bias. She asked Kurt and Sarah if she could take their picture, too. She was writing an article for a national travel magazine, she said. This beach had become a popular spot for Last Day.
Kurt put his arm around Sarah’s shoulders, felt her stiffen at his touch, and arranged the tender, unsmiling face he always used for pictures. The photographer looked at the image she’d captured and winced.
“Great. Thanks. Do you want me to send it to you?”
“I’m fine,” Sarah snapped. “I don’t need to document every single moment in my life with pictures and post them online for digital applause, thanks.”
“Sure,” Kurt said. “You can send it to me.”
He and the photographer exchanged cards and Sarah rolled her eyes.
“Until night falls,” the woman said. Sarah watched Kurt watch the photographer walk away.
They trudged onward in silence over the high dunes. The sand was cool and uncooperative, and each step was difficult, sapping the wind from their lungs so that even if they’d wanted to talk, they were too out of breath. Then, all at once, there it was: the ocean, beautiful and indifferent.
They walked by a teenage boy vomiting into a rusty trash barrel. Sarah recognized him immediately as one of the boys on the train ride from Edgewater that morning, though he was too ill to recognize her. He held on to his dirty white baseball cap in one hand and with the other gripped the barrel.
“I’m so wasted, man,” he said to Kurt. He did not remember how he had ended up at the beach. It was a bush-league move, to get so wasted before midnight. “But I am not a bush-league drinker,” he insisted.
Kurt took the boy’s hat, gave it a hard shake. Sand issued from inside the empty dome and slapped against the barrel with a pleasant sound. Kurt replaced the hat on the boy’s head so that it wouldn’t fall off.
“I puked out of my nose. My nostril. How does that happen?”
“You don’t want to know the answer to that right now,” Kurt said to him.
“I…am a phe-nom-enom.”
“We all are, brother.”
Sarah could just as easily choose to be happy. Or at least accepting. But she didn’t want to. The simplicity of anger was its most attractive feature right now, a slash-and-burn approach to all the problems this night was presenting. It made her feel better for the moment. She chewed on the inside of her cheek until she tasted the metallic tang of her blood.
“Look at them all,” she said, still chewing, nodding in the direction of the crowds setting up camp for the night. “The way they’re all clumped together in one spot. It looks like a microscopic slide of bacteria. That’s the human race. A sophisticated disease.”
“You’re too young to be this cynical.”
“I’m an old soul, apparently. My guidance counselor told me. She claims she can read auras. I hate her.”
Kurt handed her a can of soda from the bag. After a few sips Kurt offered her a splash of whiskey, which she accepted. Why not, she decided, it can’t make things worse. The whiskey tasted like a punishment. There was no way she could finish the can, but she didn’t need to. Very quickly there was a sensation that the screws holding together her cranial apparatus were now just a little bit looser. So this was the draw of alcohol, Sarah thought. It was kind of nice.
Kurt walked in front of Sarah, his path hugging the shore. The sand gleamed like a sheet of melting ice. She watched his tracks imprint, then vanish. She could not lift her gaze above the ground. Kurt, his stooped shoulders, the last light of day glimmering on the water—it was all too much to take in. The tide crept closer and the water sent a chill up from the soles of her feet to her knees. The sound of voices began to fade behind them. The shore was studded with seashells, some of them really stellar specimens, a perfect whelk, a razor clam with both valves still attached, its opalescent inner chamber flashing in the slanted light of dusk. Sarah wanted so badly to collect them all in her pockets, but what could be more pointless than hoarding seashells at the end of the world? She was about to cry when Kurt’s voice snapped up her attention.
“Look,” he said.
The sun was scattering its colored light all across the sky. Deep shades of pink stained the scalloped underbelly of the clouds. Gold clasped unevenly to the edges of a dark, stormy-looking mass. The blue sky was a mess, with white blooms and streaks, clouds growing tall as buildings, clouds stretched thin as old, threadbare rags, clouds like the tracks of animals dotting the horizon.
“Wow,” Sarah admitted.
“Beautiful.”
“That one cloud there looks stormy.”
“It’s blowing out to sea.”
“How can you tell?”
“Look at the birds.”
Seagulls were flapping their wings against the wind, holding fast in the air as though frozen. Sarah looked at Kurt. He was powerless and kind and nothing he did or said to her would make the world end or keep it going. In fact, it was a lot of pressure to put on one man, and it wasn’t fair. She wanted to apologize for this, but also to punch him, and maybe kiss again? She looked back down at the wet sand. Pink and gold light spilled into the puddles made by the anxious digging of her feet.
“You said I was too good for this world. But you said it to her, too.”
“I don’t have a defense against that, and I don’t think I should have to. If you’re so mad, I can bring you home now. I thought we’d have a nice night together. But we don’t have to be nice and we don’t have to be together.”
“Did you love her? Sarah, sister of your dead girlfriend Mary?”
“Christ, I almost married her,” Kurt said, realizing his mistake a moment too late. He meant it as a declaration of gratitude for a bullet dodged, but this young girl was a coiled viper right now.
“You almost married that horrible woman?”
“You don’t know her—it’s complicated. She had a really messed-up life. You don’t want to know the half of it,” Kurt tried to explain.
“You’re right. I don’t. I don’t care about her tragic life. It doesn’t make her special.”
“Why do all girls do this? Hate each other for no reason. It must be exhausting. Hopefully you’ll outgrow it.”
“Nope!” Sarah said. She drank as much of the whiskey and Coke as she could stomach, slugged it dramatically, as she’d seen actors do in movies, and when she felt she was about to gag she poured the rest in the sand, drowning a collection of barnacles floating in the sugary foam.
“Do you feel better now?” he asked her.
“A little, yes. Thank you.”
“Let’s build a fire.”
He dropped the cords of driftwood into the sand and began arranging them in a cone. Sarah wanted to argue about the dioxin released from burning driftwood but she kept her mouth shut, instead ripping up her issue of The Economist and the unused pages of her journal for kindling.
“Why did you love her?”
�
�She was beautiful and smart and mean. She took care of me when I had no one.”
“Did you love Mary more?”
“Maybe?” He blew onto the flames, urging the ropes of blue fire to latch onto the wood. “Probably. I was a kid. She was a kid. Who knows. We might have grown out of each other. I felt like such a loser, like everything I touched turned to shit, including Mary. Sarah seemed to reverse that. For a time. She was a sociopath, but she was brilliant, and she believed in me. In a really basic way. She believed I would kick cancer when I was sure I would die, and she was right. She believed I could make a career as a tattoo artist when it seemed like a pipe dream. When I got well again, when I was stable, she dumped me. Even that was a gift because then I was free.”
The fire burned a pale lavender color that neither of them had expected to be so pretty, so enchanting. When Kurt was satisfied that it would burn without his coaxing, he sat on the sleeping bag Sarah had laid out and together they watched the waves cross each other in wide, endless X’s, watched until even these subtle hatches were rubbed away by the night and the waves were nothing but sound. The bluish-purple fire crackled softly in the dark.
“There’s no moon tonight.”
“It’s a new moon.”
“I hate how no moon is called a new moon. It’s a fucked-up name.”
“You’re hungry. Time to eat.”
So they ate. They ate every single thing they’d bought at the store. Two packages of chicken sausage, an entire bag of marshmallows, an extra-large bag of barbecue potato chips, two slightly sour oranges. Kurt swigged his pint of whiskey straight, saving the last sip for Sarah, who drank it, shuddered, then fell into his arms. Kurt turned his face toward hers like she was the last thing left to eat. He chewed on her neck, her earlobe, the sides of her face. The actual coitus part did not hurt the way Sarah thought it would. From Lindsey’s accounts, the first time was supposed to be so painful you almost died, and if the pain didn’t kill you, the hemorrhaging would. There was none of the fabled bleeding. The only thing that hurt was her face from kissing. Kurt’s beard had clearly started to grow back a couple of hours after he’d shaved (Oh! she thought, that’s where the phrase five-o’clock shadow comes from), and the stubble abraded her skin. His teeth kept clanking into hers, a collision more uncomfortable than painful. Kurt’s penis felt like a sweaty hand that had fallen asleep against her upper inner thigh. He struggled to get inside her, and once he did he didn’t stay there long before slipping out again. Some people walked by—they could hear the voices approaching in the dark. Kurt pulled the corner of the sleeping bag over them and covered Sarah’s face with his. When the people had passed, he kissed her on the forehead and tried again to work his way inside. Finally he made a sound like choking and she felt the warm trickle of his semen on her stomach.
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