Last Day

by Domenica Ruta

  —

  THE CONGREGANTS OF Last Kingdom dripped large puddles all over the beautiful parquet floor of the YMCA lobby. Her boss, Roberto, was going to be so mad about that, Karen thought. He was obsessed with these floors. He tended them like an orchid, blocked off the lobby and its entrance every winter in order to protect these floors from the salty, sandy trudging of shoes.

  “I really need to wipe this up,” Karen said to the police officers buzzing around. “Can I go get some towels? I’ll come right back. Promise.”

  No one answered her.

  The parishioners had been instructed to remain quiet while the interrogations proceeded, but it was as if none of them spoke English, Officer Stone said. “It’s like the Tower of Fucking Babel in here, am I right?” he sneered.

  “I think they speak English just fine, they’re pretending not to,” Officer McCarron replied after he’d radioed the precinct for a couple of interpreters. “They’re all out of their gourds is what they are,” he concluded.

  Karen saw a police officer handcuffing Rosette and leading her to the door.

  “Rose!” she yelled, her heart throwing itself again and again against the cage of her chest.

  Rosette’s foot slipped in an invisible puddle of pool water that had collected near the front entrance. Karen rushed toward her and caught Rosette by the shoulders before she could fall. “Today is a day that’s never been before, babygirl,” Rosette said to Karen as the police pulled her away.

  * * *

  —

  THE OCEAN WAS a dull mirror of the sky, the tide sweeping sideways across the sand. A flock of noisy shorebirds milled around its wake. Laughing gulls and herring gulls waddled together in the shallow water; oystercatchers ran on their absurd legs and startled each other into flight. Perched on a stone, a cormorant spread its wings to dry in the sun. Cormorants were Sarah’s favorite shorebird. They were impressive hunters, and their turquoise eyes were proof that there existed a breach in the world of magic and fairy tales into this one. But Sarah was not looking at any of it. She was staring directly at the sun, holding it in her gaze as long she could stand it, hoping to go blind.

  How long would it take before that actually happened? she wondered. It was one of life’s precepts—don’t stare at the sun—and like many others, it was something that assumed understanding while the nuances were never fully explained.

  Sarah stared at the sun a while longer, then blinked away the glare and looked at the birds. Whatever, she thought, blindness was only cool if you were musically gifted, and Sarah hadn’t been able to get through six weeks of guitar lessons—the strings had hurt her fingers. Now she was giving up on blindness, too.

  She trudged back toward the entrance of the beach. The sea was an unvarnished sheet of silver pocked by nodes of white light. Wind pushed paper trash and empty cans from the night before in crab-like patterns across the sand. Here and there, extinguished fires had scarred the sand black. She’d had sex for the first time; she’d been dumped for the first time: now she was alone and full of feelings that were at once ancient, almost inherent, and also brand-new. She didn’t know what to do next.

  As she walked a long path to the entrance of the beach, Sarah tried on a sunny little delusion for size—maybe Kurt was coming back? Maybe he had simply gone for coffee and would return any minute now with a steaming cup for her, black with three sugars, which he didn’t know she liked but he would guess it about her and be right. But that was exactly the delusion that had gotten her into this situation. He’d packed up all his things when he left. He was gone.

  The only thing worse than being dumped was being dumped via the biggest cliché in the world. Young girl gives virginity to older man who hightails it out before she wakes up the next morning. I mean, come on! That was supposed to happen to those other ordinary Sarahs, she thought, the kind who wore high heels and different varieties of underwear and burst into song when they drove around in cars together. Those girls were well equipped for this moment. Sarah had expected a lot of disasters, but not this. The worst-case scenario she could come up with before this was that Kurt’s heart would seize up in the night, the completion of love having an arresting effect on him, and he would die in her arms; the next morning she would light his body on fire, and later face the police brave as Electra, answering to a higher law. Or they would fall more deeply in love than she could even imagine and live a long, interesting life together, their intimacy so powerful they would feel each other’s illnesses and hunger and stubbed toes from the next room; they would be childless and grow old, a sculpture garden they built together their legacy after death. That and some swans. They would raise swans.

  It pleased her mildly that her storm prediction was right, and annoyed her still that Kurt had doubted her and wasn’t here to acknowledge it. The sun tucked itself behind a wispy gray cloud that was fast erasing color from the sky. The temperature had dropped since she’d woken up. In the distance Sarah saw a very fat man in a black wetsuit followed by two golden retrievers lumber over the dunes and into the water. He was as big as a walrus, with short, sausagey arms and a small bald head settled into the deep folds of his neck skin. He had a thick black mustache and a rubbery smile, the kind seen only on the faces of the very religious, the mentally slow, or those recently returned from a brush with death. The man tossed a ball into the ocean and the dogs darted over the sand and raced into the waves to fetch it. He waded in after them, lobbing the ball again and again as he swam deeper, his dogs paddling nearby.

  The spangled surface of the water flattened suddenly, as though hushed, and the first raindrops fell, cool pricks against the skin, stippling the dirty-looking sand. Sarah dropped her backpack and walked into the water.

  It was cold. Bolts of ice shot up from her ankles to her knees. She was a strong swimmer but her clothes and sneakers were weighing her down. Numbness was working its way up her body, starting with her toes, then her legs. She wanted to swim as far as she could and let herself be held by the ocean until she slipped out of its grip and just drowned. A watery, Shakespearean end to this psychosexual tragedy, a clichéd coda to the clichéd climax of her clichéd life.

  Sarah had dog-paddled a little deeper into the water when the selfishness and absurdity of her suicide sank in. Who was she kidding? She didn’t want to die. She loved her parents. Had she remembered to tell them that before she’d left the house? She wanted to know what grade she’d gotten on her politics paper. And the water was too damn cold. So she turned around and began to swim back to shore.

  The current had carried her out much farther than she’d thought. It pulled her deeper, tugging her body with such force it felt personal. She realized her feet couldn’t touch the bottom and a shock of fear ripped through her. Reaching with her toes, she couldn’t even sense how far down the bottom might be. The fat man and his dogs were still bobbing in the water, tiny dots very far away now. Rain pelted the back of her head. She took off her sneakers and let them drop, hoping the lost weight would help her. She swam hard against the current, not seeming to move any closer to the shore. In the sky the clouds broke over the beach and the faintest rainbow leaked through the haze.

  * * *

  —

  KURT HEARD THE rain slapping his helmet. The gray sky was thickening like a scab over the weak light of morning. He hoped he could make it home before it really started raining. He hoped the girl, Sarah, made it home okay. He’d left her sixty dollars, all the cash he had left in his wallet, and a note. What did I tell you? The world isn’t done with us yet. Fun night. Take care.

  What was he supposed to do? Hang around? She was smart and tough and clearly got off on little adventures like this. She’d be fine.

  He needed gas but he was almost home and he needed a shower and his bed more. Nice rainy day to sleep and watch movies in bed. There was cold pizza left over in his fridge. He was looking forward to it. Basic needs,
so easily met. Before him an almost empty highway and a peaceful day full of nothing. A song caromed around his head, an isolated line in pursuit of its full verse, I can’t keep track of each fallen robin. How did the rest of it go? he wondered.

  * * *

  —

  SARAH CLARK-DAVENPORT WAS willing to do the hard work of dying. She had not eaten much in weeks. She sipped water but did not drink it. The attrition of her cardiovascular muscle tissue was quickening. Her pulse was slackening. The air that flowed in and out of her body was slow and unwelcome.

  Had she slept? She couldn’t remember. She sat on the floor and gazed out the window. She had been in this spot for a long time, since before sunset. Now it was morning and she was still there. A robin landed on the windowsill. Sarah thought of Emily Dickinson. That bitch. She could never look at a robin and not think of Dickinson, and she hated her for that. She could not look at a robin without thinking of her sister, either: Mary, with her perennial gasps of awe at the sight of a simple bird.

  “Please—” Sarah said to the robin, tears falling from her eyes without her permission. She lifted her hand to tap the glass.

  * * *

  —

  NORA HAD JUST woken up from an afternoon nap. She’d left her window open and a cool breeze carried the scent of the sea into her room. How vulnerable it felt to sleep without a window screen. She brought her long white fingers to her fluttering heart. A line from Dickinson shot through her like a tranquilizer.

  “Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb—”

  After the morning excursion to Delos, their tour guide had left the rest of the afternoon open for wandering, with a wine tasting and five-course meal scheduled for 8 P.M. What to do in the meantime? Nora had meditated already. She’d read her Buddhist self-help books and written in her journal. What she needed to do now and for the next four hours was to embrace the moment. Enjoy its spaciousness. It was so much harder than she felt it should be. Nora was used to time being broken into very specific fifty-minute blocks, each client a different shade of crazy coloring in the open spaces of her day. It was a problem of privilege, but a problem all the same, that relaxing into this vacation was so much bloody work for her.

  She decided on coffee downstairs in the hotel café and then a walk through the village. She put on a white linen dress that showed off her lovely collarbone and a lavender silk scarf to cover it back up. For today it was enough that she was willing to walk and not run, to dress nicely and not hide in yoga pants.

  In the lobby of the hotel sat the Italian widower from her tour group, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the local Mykonos newspaper. He folded it immediately when he saw Nora, a brightness in his eyes that Nora wanted to dismiss but couldn’t. She ordered her coffee and took the seat next to him, as his gallant wave of hand bid her.

  “I’m so impressed,” Nora said, lifting his newspaper and refolding it more neatly. “Do all Europeans speak so many languages or just you? We Americans are so dumb in comparison. We only speak English and barely that.”

  “Oh, no. I look only at the pictures. It’s all a-Greek to me.” He smiled. He had several gold fillings in his molars that winked in the sunlight.

  It took Nora a moment to get the joke, and the Italian widower waited for her, holding his breath until she did, then they laughed together hard and loud. Nora’s scarf came unloosed from her neck and fell to the floor. He bent over to pick it up. He held it in his hand, not yet ready to return it.

  * * *

  —

  BREAKFAST WAS OVER at Heart House. Two staff members, morbidly hungover, scraped spongy unfinished pancakes off plates, then stacked them in the dishwasher. Lauren herded the residents one by one into the living room, where they watched a sensationalist documentary on the possible alien origins of Stonehenge. They were supposed to be doing arts and crafts, but the missing-Karen controversy had screwed up the whole schedule.

  “Here you go,” Lauren said as she walked Sadie over to the window seat, surrendering at last to the chaos of the day. She laid some extra pillows on the bench for the woman, who looked both older and younger than she actually was. Lauren ran her fingers through Sadie’s silvery hair, recently trimmed and seeming to sparkle in the morning light that streamed through the bay window. Lauren fluffed the pillows some more. “Nice and comfy,” she said. It felt good to do this one thing right.

  “Do you see him up there?” she asked Sadie, whose fingers were already pressed up against the glass.

  “Hello, brother Bear,” Sadie said to the sky.

  * * *

  —

  TIANNA WAS USED to blaming her brothers for her troubles, but this time she couldn’t. She and Miles and Avonte had not made it to the bonfire last night, but it wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really, that her grandmother’s car had a busted alternator, and without a scapegoat to contain her disappointment, Tianna’s world began to unravel.

  “Why can’t you get it fixed?” Tianna had wailed, her face dripping with tears and snot as she beseeched her grandmother, a woman she had until now assumed was all-powerful because she was fifty-six. This fiction was just beginning to dismantle itself and Tianna could not handle it.

  “We can’t just sit here,” Tianna cried.

  “I can’t afford to pay attention,” Maeve answered, “let alone what they charge at that crooked auto shop. They’re swindlers! All of them!”

  Tianna suggested asking Dorothy, Maryann, Beryl, Lucy—every name her grandmother had ever mentioned in her long tirades against the women in her social circle.

  “It’s none of their business what’s going on under the hood of my car!” Maeve crushed a cigarette into a pristine glass ashtray.

  “What about the bus?”

  To this Maeve rolled her eyes and waved her hand in a way that let Tianna know the whole idea of going out was hopeless. Her mother was useless, her father nonexistent, her mother’s boyfriends, Dennis especially, a burden, her teachers disgruntled, indifferent, and mean. Maeve was a decent woman—she never treated Miles or Avonte differently even though they were not her blood, a kindness not extended by Miles’s grandmother whenever the three children stayed with her. Maeve’s house was clean and well stocked with both real food and junk food. But last night her grandmother, the one official grown-up who cared enough to try, at least a little, proved to be as impotent as the rest of the adults in her life.

  “We’re on our own,” Tianna told Miles. He was falling asleep on the pullout couch, his eyelids fluttering as he clutched Maeve’s tablet in his arms like a teddy bear, the animated Selfless Knight playing too loudly on the screen.

  Tianna could not go to school Monday and say she had done nothing on Last Day, so she would take matters into her own hands. She woke Miles early the next morning with the promise of breakfast ice cream (“Grandma told me we could have it. No, we don’t have to wake her up and ask first….”), then led her brother into the kitchen. She had already set up an offering—a big saucepot, a box of matches, yesterday’s crumpled newspaper, the backpack Dennis’s weird friend had given her, and a big mixing bowl of water.

  “I need your help carrying this to the backyard,” she told Miles.

  Miles was sleepy and agreeable. He took the empty pot, paper, and matches while Tianna transported the backpack and bowl of water, careful not to spill it.

  They went through nearly the whole box of matches before they were able to make one ignite. Minutes later they had a roaring fire going in the pot that they fed with ripped-up newspaper.

  “Okay, go get your doll,” Tianna told Miles.

  “He’s not a doll. He’s Viscount Darkdoom.”

  “Whatever. It’s time to burn him.”

  “I don’t want to anymore.”

  “You have to—” she began, when a leaf of burning newspaper floated up out of the fire and collided with the d
ry, stiff bedsheets that Maeve had left too long on the clothesline.

  “Oh shit,” Miles said.

  “Get the bowl!” Tianna cried, then pushed him out of the way as she scrambled to get it herself. She tripped on her way to the now-ignited sheet and spilled the water into the grass. The fire leapt from sheet to towel, working its way through Maeve’s clean laundry. Tianna tried the garden hose but the spigot was so rusty she couldn’t turn the knob.

  “Mom’s going to kill us,” Miles said, reading his sister’s mind. The children watched, stunned, while flames leapt up and up, as though yearning to grab the low branches of a tree.

  * * *

  —

  TERRENCE LOOKED AT the white feathery remnants of the previous night’s fire and heard her voice. He knew exactly what she would say: that his need to ejaculate onto recently vacated areas was a function of male privilege. It was the same cowardly assertion of dominance that had fueled the Columbian conquest of the indigenous lands now known patriarchically as the Americas. Marking his territory like a tyrant. Co-opting spaces as his own genetic field through a passive-aggressive violation of an empty—read vaginal, read feminine—space.

  But it wasn’t! It really, really wasn’t, Terrence argued with her in his head. He was all for nonbinary gender egalitarianism. Like one hundred percent. This had nothing to do with that. It was just an itch, and when he saw the clean living room rug after everyone had gone upstairs to bed, or right now, this empty campsite—he had to scratch it, or it would nag at him until he couldn’t calm down or concentrate on anything else. It relaxed him and it was so quick, averaging three minutes. It was a function of his OCD. Not his fault.

  Oh yeah, and rape culture is not anyone’s fault? Next you’ll tell me mental illness is an excuse for racism and genocide? Her imaginary censure aroused him even more. Why did he love her so much? She was a forty-seven-year-old woman with flagrant displays of body hair, a lesbian happily married to a transgender man. She was a teacher at his goddamn school. Dr. Vasquez-McQueen could not be more out of his league; he had never wanted anything more.