The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  They flew to Greece. Charlotte felt elated and terrified, angry with no one in particular. Alan rented them a dark-wood sailboat, and Charlotte wore a bikini every day. The nausea had subsided, her small breasts were not so small, and her belly was still smooth and flat, but now she could feel that seed, how it swelled within her, fighting for room to grow. She felt Alan watching it while she sunbathed, while she ate, when they walked into ancient temples, and into quaint tavernas. Greece was violently bright, but the seed grew in candlelight; it acquired a low male voice. She doted on her husband, and Alan caught her staring at him with no less than religious gratitude, but the seed was growing, and she would always feel its pull toward a different and inaccessible time.

  I’d soon learn, to my immense satisfaction, that it was a boy—a boy who was named by Alan, who knew from the start that you were not biologically his. And he believed, of course, in his beloved biology, but also (he did; he did more than me) in responsibility, in unconditional love. But with your strange dark eyes and olive skin and generally contrary nature, you would never let us forget how strongly restlessness was bred in both your blood and my own.

  I did the wrong thing, not telling you. And I believe I never stopped thinking about those long-ago nights on a ship because of the lie that has driven me since then. The lie and how deeply I love you kept Luke Varengis and his selfish ardor always looming larger than life, and gradually I let it take over my imagination. At some point I began to believe in all kinds of notions that I would never have admitted to anyone. I began to believe that I had made a mistake not finding him, that if he had only understood what had really happened, everything would have been different. I could never see him in my mind’s eye as a young man simply out for a good time, someone shiftless and restless and maybe even as impressionable as myself. As much as Fm aware that it makes little sense, Fm not sure I’d be telling the truth if I told you I could even see that now. My reaction to you, how I loved you—my first child, my only son—never quite separated from him, or maybe just who I was so briefly when I was with him. Those moments of pure feeling in the middle of the sea, the begging in the goddamn streets—I let it take over my life.

  So this is yours now. Now you know. Alan was your father, and we’d agreed to let him be your only father, but I think you should know when we are both gone that there was a missing piece. Maybe you’ve felt it all this time, and for any pain this has caused, I can only offer… well, I can offer you, without any qualifications, all of my love. And I feel very confident in offering up all of Alan’s love too. But it’s not enough, is it? Nothing will ever be enough. Apologies, in my experience, are rarely much more than excuses.

  What would I have done if I’d found him here in Oaxaca, older and alive? I don’t know. I might have had to call you right now instead of writing this letter and give you the option of meeting him. But for better or worse I don’t have to make that decision. His name was Luke Varengis (you don’t, for what it’s worth, look much like him), and he’s gone, and when you read this we’ll all be gone. It’s funny how easily I can imagine that.

  Being your mother is the best thing about living, because every time I look at you I am filled with certainty, which is, I believe—no matter who you are—a very rare sensation. I know that I made at least one difficult choice that was without a doubt the right one.

  Signing off is impossible. You know how I hate good-byes. And I’m sorry, I know, because the blank space of silence is worse.

  19

  H ere was something Alice now knew: She was born, to sure, out of fairness. She was socialism; she was a chore wheel. She evened out the score.

  Looking at her mother’s signature, she felt between her fingers the worn-out paper and ink. She could smudge the words into dark blurs; she could tear the page to shreds. She realized that she was biting the insides of her mouth and she had been for a while now—gnawing up the pink flesh where no one could see. And just when Alice could barely hear her mother’s voice, when the words on the paper were very nearly just words, she could feel Charlotte’s hand stroking her forehead—too soft and not substantial enough to believe in perhaps, but that was exactly the way her hand had always felt.

  “She’s my sister,” Alice heard him say from where he was sitting, right behind her on the poured concrete. She held on to the letter and didn’t turn around.

  “What?”

  “She’s my sister,” he repeated, his voice unstable and vaguely breathless, referring to Alice for some inexplicable reason in the third person. He came forward and sat next to her.

  “Of course I am,” she said dismissively

  “And so is she.”

  “Who?”

  “Erik—”

  “That woman,” Alice said, “is not your sister.” But even as she said it, she knew that was exactly who Erika was. And she also knew that August hadn’t been involved—at least not in die way Alice had assumed—with her.

  “She is,” Gus said. “She was born eight years after me. She grew up with him. Do you understand? That man who inspired our mother to lie and cheat and leave raised her. That man was my father.”

  “You had only one father. He raised you, he loved you, and he just died. I can’t even bring myself to believe this letter is true. How do you know it’s true? How do you know she wasn’t working on a novel—one of her many unfinished projects— and that the explanation page—the part where she explains that it is all a fiction—how do we know it didn’t disappear?”

  “When we went to Oaxaca, I met his ex-wife—her name is Elena. She’s from Mexico City and she’s a potter or a ceramicist or … whatever; she’s artsy. She met him when he was working in Mexico City, where he’d apparently moved not long after his encounter with Mom. He’d become fluent in Spanish; he managed a popular bar. So Elena was dismissive of Mom’s letter—apparently Luke had a serious string of affairs—I could tell there wasn’t too much love lost between him and Elena by the time he died—but she was perfectly polite to me. She wasn’t warm or anything like that, but she gave me a drink, cooked me a steak. Even though she was pretty skeptical about my story, she told me the basics about him, some medical history—nothing too unusual: my paternal grandfather went blind, things like that—and she told me they had a daughter named Erika. At first she seemed cautious about telling me where the daughter lived, but the more we spoke I got the feeling that she was kind of worried about her. She finally told me that if I tried to convince Erika to return home, if I gave her my word, she would tell me where Erika was. God knows why she thought her daughter would listen to me.”

  “And Erika?”

  “Well, for starters, as I guess you know, she’s pregnant.”

  “By whom?”

  “Some guy.” He shrugged. “Just some guy she met in San Jose and followed here and he’s long gone. Uncanny, isn’t it?”

  “Stupid,” Alice said.

  “Well, we know you’re so far above anything so sordid.”

  He had, she realized, the wrong notions about her, but she would let him have them. She wished, in a way, that they were true.

  “You’re right,” he conceded. “It is stupid, and she’s irresponsible, among other things. But she’s had quite a time. Our father—Erika’s and mine—apparently wasn’t worth all those decades of dreaming.”

  “Big surprise. So, what, you’re bonding with her now? Catching up on lost time?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “How could you do this to Cady? Why didn’t you just tell her the truth? Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I just… couldn’t. I couldn’t tell anyone. It was too weird; it was as though my life hit a wall, and every day I’d see Erika and we’d just talk and talk and it was so overwhelming. It was exciting. Don’t look at me like that. It was talk, only talk, but I’d lose track of time. She’d tell me anything I asked. Anything. She wasn’t shy and she wasn’t suspicious—although …”

  “What,” Alice said, her tongue thi
ck and heavy in her mouth.

  “Sometimes I got the feeling she didn’t even believe me about being my sister. It was like she just wanted to talk. Maybe she’d have talked that way with anyone, but I don’t think so. And I knew Cady was jealous, but I just couldn’t make it all come out even. I kept thinking that I’d make it up to Cady, that when I told her eventually after I’d sorted things out… I don’t know; I thought she’d understand.”

  “Well,” Alice said, “that’s expecting an awful lot. It’s also kind of cruel.”

  “Maybe I wanted to know that Cady could trust me, that someone actually trusted me. But she became so miserable and angry and demanding that I forgot my intentions. Look, I’m not saying I blame her for being that way. I don’t know what I thought would happen. I wasn’t thinking past when I’d get the next story from Erika. It was like hearing about scattered pieces of yourself, if you can imagine, and feeling the pieces come together inside, literally clicking into place.”

  “Were you … Was he like you?”

  “Yeah,” Gus said fiercely, “he was. But it might be mostly in my head. I’ll never know, right?”

  “When you look at her, at Erika—what can you possibly see? I mean, beyond the initial impression. She’s awful. I mean, really, she is.”

  “Weren’tyou charmed, Alice—just a little?”

  She stared at him, refusing to cooperate.

  “You want to know what I see?” he asked.

  Alice nodded.

  He hesitated before saying, “Well, Mom, of course. Alice, she’s just like her.” He looked at Alice and instantly saw that he didn’t need to explain.

  “I can tell you one thing,” Alice said, letting loose a stone that had grown hot in her hand. “That is Mom’s absolute worst nightmare.”

  Gus laughed bitterly.

  “Tell me,” Alice said, “have you kept your word and tried to convince Erika to go home?”

  He nodded. “She doesn’t want to go, so … What she really seems to want is to be chased.”

  “And you thought you’d fill that position? It’s not so easy, is it? Being on the other side?”

  “You can’t begin to compare it. You know I wanted to come. You know I did. I just, I always felt … once I’d left …” His face changed just then, going from pliant to stubbornly set. “How could he have wanted me?” And Alice knew he was talking about their father, who would always be sitting in a cold room wearing a few extra sweaters, slowly turning pages. “He had to accept me if he wanted her. I was only part of the package.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, but as she said it, she couldn’t help remembering how the invisible net her parents cast around their children was, in Gus’s case, always larger and looser. If she ever thought of it—the difference in the way he treated them—she’d written it off as nothing to take seriously: a difference between sons and daughters, or maybe a reaction to how Charlotte and Gus often seemed aligned somehow.

  “I’m not saying it was—” Gus muttered, cutting himself off, while keeping his eyes on the waves. “He was my father; I know that. And,” he said, “I miss him,” pressing his right thumb and forefinger to his temples. “But Alice, did you read that?”

  “I think she killed herself,” Alice said.

  Gus replied immediately, in a way that convinced Alice that he believed it too, or at least that he’d considered the possibility. “Don’t ever say that,” he said. His jaw was plainly clenched. “Don’t. She was out of her head when she came home that time. She had a problem with sedatives, she had a problem with lying, but she did not want to die, okay? Okay Alice?”

  Gus was finally looking right at her. In his eyes she could see Charlotte’s eyes, still blessedly familiar. She could see how those eyes would have watched the fire, doing no more to combat the flames than engage them in a staring contest. Charlotte would have even possessed the same insistence that all she was doing was passing time while watching the blaze, an act neither dangerous nor strange. As Gus insisted otherwise, Alice believed it now more than ever. “Okay” she said, and what she felt was a surprising relief. If up until now she had blurred the line between her mother and August, this was the moment she’d be able to point to as when that line came clear. She saw that her brother needed to believe—maybe even more than Alice did—in Charlotte’s unwillingness to leave them.

  “Don’t ever doubt that again,” he said. He looked panicked and a little strung out. Alice fought not to ask when the last time was that he’d eaten. “I’m serious.”

  “Okay” she repeated, and she’d never felt closer to her mother than she did right then, as Alice suddenly needed nothing besides her own screwy conviction. She didn’t need him to agree. She didn’t even need him to listen. “You have to decide who you care about, Gus.”

  He looked at her suspiciously.

  “Why did you have to go and get married?”

  “I just did,” he said, so solemnly that Alice was uncomfortable for him. “He was … dying, and I hadn’t been home and I’d left you to do everything and it was too late for fixing any of that. I guess I wanted to do something big, something real. Those urges are the death of me, and look, you know who I am—I seem to have these urges all the time. Usually I disappear while following through on them. With Cady I thought I’d try doing the opposite. But I screwed up,” he said. “I couldn’t handle it. You …” he said. “You’re so careful,” he muttered, and then shook his head, as if that was not quite what he meant to say.

  The ocean, yards away, reflected metallic light. Sunlight thrummed off dusty car mirrors for miles in both directions. She could feel herself giving over to something; her insides turned over and inside out as she finally let herself cry. “What?” she managed, her voice breaking, “what am I supposed to do?”

  “I know you hopped a plane last-minute,” Gus said, his voice quieting, “and Alice, I know you drove those roads after dark. I’m not talking about any of that. And I’m not talking about what you get up to on the sly. I know you’ve always gone off and had your little secrets. You must, since, for starters, I’ve never met a single man—or woman, for that matter—you’d even halfheartedly admit to caring about or even, you know, enjoying. I know your life isn’t as orderly as it seems. It can’t be. Don’t look so surprised. I really hate that about you, how you assume that you understand me and I don’t even know you, that you’re somehow always just below my radar. You are careful, or if you’re not careful, you’re, you know, closed. Besides me, there’s Eleanor and that’s enough, or at least that’s how it’s always seemed, in terms of getting out there and getting on with it.”

  “I don’t think either of us has been very good at that.”

  “You think I haven’t tried with anyone else besides Cady? I tried. Believe me, I’ve tried. I loved Cady. I still love Cady. But, if anything, I’ve fought too hard against her being the only one, and I know that’s one of the reasons why we’ve had such a rough time of it. How many people have you told about Mom—really told, not just the winning details—in your whole adult life?”

  “You think it’s brave to tell just anybody about all that?”

  “I’m not talking about anybody. I’m talking about letting someone know you besides your oldest friend. Someone besides me.” He put his hand on her shoulder, stiltedly “How many people have you told?”

  “One,” she said.

  “And who was it?”

  It was just hours ago. I don’t even know his last name.

  Silence crept between them. “Come on, Alice, please. At least look at me.”

  Inertia was built into the landscape here. In her mind her limbs were sinking into cool sand and she began to crave—the way she might crave ice cream or a drink—the time right before nightfall and right after dusk when the sky took on the murky color that lives beneath the sea. Alice pictured the marsh of home and how there—with the time difference—it was already that hour. She wondered if it had snowed, if the swans were guarding their egg
s in the reeds and if any babies would live. She pictured seasons passing and passing and how could she say good-bye to all that—how, before Gus returned? The images played over and over again and then they flittered away like the tail end of a filmstrip. There was nothing to be gained in being able to see such radiance only as a kind of shared past. She looked down at her hand and it was holding the letter, this airmail paper with final words so pathetically revered as truth.

  At first she thought she was reaching out to return it to him, but as she extended her hand she saw that she had let the papers go. He went after them at first with a dire reach, just as she’d seen him dive for Frisbees countless times. He pitched himself forward into the dirt exactly as she would have imagined had she given it any forethought. But the wind was up and blowing east, and the papers were flying in the direction of the waves. The papers flew overhead like helium balloons, and they both watched in silence. They walked toward the dunes and then uphill in the sand, stopping at the highest point. They watched the water being combed back by the tide, and Alice felt her hair being combed back by her mother, who used to sing as she worked through her daughter’s tangles, softly and off-key. The tides commanded attention; they were as mystifying as Charlotte, as inaccessible as August, but there was no way to fight them, as they didn’t fight back. Their effect was constant and larger than intention. Her mother and August—they hadn’t intended to chip away at her, stinging her so precisely as they’d both so often done. Like the tides, they couldn’t help themselves; and she had offered herself as ballast.

  It struck Alice that part of the reason she’d always felt panicked when her mother, and later Gus, would stay away was that she had no idea who surrounded them, and, perhaps strangely enough, Alice could never quite picture either of them truly on their own for much longer than a car ride. They both were people who resembled the light of the moon, and there was no original moonlight; there was only the reflection of the sun. Her mother and Gus came alive through other people, other places. They existed by being seen.