"Jesus," she says. "Why'd you do that?"
"I don't know. I think I had a little breakdown or something. At first I think I stayed out here because I was listening for that Morbid Gullets school bus to come back, and bring you home again. But after a while, when I realized that you weren't coming, I still stayed out here."
"Wow," she says. She stares at her fingers, which look now as though they've been rolled in brown sugar.
"Yeah, I couldn't even go to work. Maggie was counting on me to be there but I couldn't do it. Couldn't talk to people." Everything gets a little blurry. "And I couldn't sleep—except for when I'd sleep for days at a time."
At first I'm not sure she's even heard me. She puts her arms down in the sand and rolls them around so that sand sticks to every inch of them, which seems to take all her concentration for a moment. Then she looks over at me and says, "God, would you just look at us, Lily? Look at us! The agony of us! We had so many bad things happen to us. Why does everything have to be so tough all the time?" Her eyes are shining in the dark. "We've got to get over all this stupid childhood stuff, get our minds right again. We made everything harder than it had to be. Why couldn't I have just said, 'Sorry, I'm grown up now. Good-bye,' and then you could have said, 'Fine, see you around,' and then we could have parted friends and maybe even kept in touch? You know? Don't you get it? It's all that bad stuff from childhood, just clinging to us like a bad smell."
I realize then that what I wanted was for her to say, "Oh, I'm so sorry," but I can see she's not going to. I shouldn't have expected that she could do that. It was too much. I look away, feel my eyes stinging with tears.
"Anyway, look at your life," she says softly and leans over and pokes me in the elbow. "You did great. You've got a wonderful life here; you know you do. I mean, your hair is ridiculous, and you somehow never learned how cool lava lamps can be, and you sleep in a bed with deceased cooties. But compared to me, you're like the queen of coping. I wish I was like you."
"Oh, you do not. Don't even give me that crap."
"Oh, I do so!" She leaps up and pulls me to my feet. "Hey, you know what we need? A reconnection ritual! Let's see—what can we do?" She looks around, as though materials for reconnection rituals are going to be lying around on the beach. "Okay. I know. Let's go skinny-dipping! Come on. What do you say?" In a second, she's ripped off all her clothes—the jeans and the tank top and her underwear—and thrown them over her shoulder onto the sand, and is standing there, illuminated in the moonlight, grinning at me like a crazy person. "Come on, you! Drop trou!"
Her skinny body, tanned all over, has practically no boobs to speak of, just tiny dark nipples standing up on little tan mounds, and only the merest shadow of pubic hair. The Brown women don't specialize in those attributes.
"The water is going to be freezing."
"Aw, so what? This is a reconnection ritual. A rebirth. You have to suffer to have a rebirth." She sprints down to the water and runs right in, as though it's going to be a hospitable temperature, which I know it is not. She doesn't even yell as she goes under, just slips into the water and comes up and shakes her hair.
"Come on! It's not that bad."
I watch her for a moment, and then think, what the hell, and so in slow motion, I step out of my sweatpants and underpants and take off my T-shirt, fold them neatly on the sand, and walk over. She's watching me while she treads water. I can see the bright wet skin of her arms gleaming in the darkness.
"Hey, where did you get those boobs?" she calls. "Holy cow! Did you buy those? They're melons!"
I have two of the smaller breasts on the planet today (miniature plums rather than melons), but they did slightly improve—in size, at least, if not in quality—after childbirth and a year of industrious breastfeeding, so at the moment they are possibly three microns larger than hers. "Simon brought them," I say, just a little shyly.
"Wow! Babies are just too good! I've got to get me one of those!"
Once I get to the water, I have to ease myself in. I can't quite believe I'm doing this. The water is unbelievably cold at first, but then I go into a state of numbness and realize that it's still possible to live under these circumstances. My nerve endings give up their screaming after a moment. Lying on my back, naked, feeling the inky black water surrounding me and holding me up, I finally discover the way of just giving up all semblance of fight and letting myself go limp. I stare at the big bowl of stars overhead, the trails of clouds, the fuzzy glow of the moon. After another few moments, I stop shivering completely and just drift there, going along with the ripples, tasting the saltiness at the corner of my mouth. It's just me, the sky, and the cold, salty water.
I think I could go on this way for a long, long time. Who knew that peace was just outside the back door? Why wasn't I doing this every night?
15
We float for a while, listening to the far-away traffic noises way out on Route 1 and, closer in, to the sound of frogs and peepers over in the reeds. Then I realize that what I thought was water lapping quietly against the dock was really sniffling.
"Are you crying?" I say.
She says in a choked-off voice, "Look. He just went crazy, okay? Always harping on this and that, and being really gross on the bus, always stoned and being really negative."
I tread water for a moment. "I assume this is a continuation of our non-conversation about Thor, right?"
"Yes. I just want to tell you this, and then we won't talk about it ever again." She makes snuffling noises. "He was getting to be really moody and bad, and then the bass player, Stony, started liking me, and he told me he liked me lots more than Thor did. God, I feel so guilty saying this. But Stony was so... good to me, and that just made Thor get worse and worse. He was always getting high, and then he'd be impossible. And so one day the two of them were being real pissy with each other, and then things got out of hand, and as a joke, kind of, they had this huge fight with knives and all. And then they came in the bus, all cut up and stuff, and told me that Stony had won me. They were both laughing, like this was just so funny. He'd won me, they said, just like I was a piece of property or something. I thought they were joking, but they said, no, no, it was really true. I was Stony's now. And so... then Thor was all drunk and crying, and he said for me to get out, and so I left the bus in the middle of the night and walked into town..."
"What state were you in?" I paddle over closer to her. I need to see her face.
"State? Emotional state?"
"No. United State."
"Oh. Vermont."
Vermont. I feel a little stab of shock. She was just two states away, two tiny states away. I could have driven there in a few hours, could have picked her up and brought her back home. If she'd called. I would have been so glad to come.
She's going on in a flat voice, oblivious to the fact that my heart has just broken again. "I walked into town and went to a little diner that opened at, like, four in the morning, and I was telling this cool guy who owned the place that I needed a way to make some money, and did he know where I could get a job, and then he just says, 'Well, my name is Kristoff, and my wife, Anya, and I have three babies, and we live on a farm growing vegetables, and she's a painter who never can find time to paint, so why don't you just come home with me and you can help her out?' "
"Just like that?"
"Yep. Went there that morning and stayed for a few years, actually. Anya and I baked bread and grew vegetables and wore long skirts and boots and took care of the babies—there were five of them by the time I left. I let my awful black hair grow out, and I became like this organic farm person. People kind of came and went, and we played music at night and had bonfires, and Anya and I did all the cooking. We were real hippies."
"Man, you take risks. I can't believe the risks you take."
"Risks? What was risky about that?"
"No, I mean the whole thing. Risky to just walk off in the middle of the night, and risky to have gone off in the bus in the first place, come to th
ink of it. And then you go home with some man you don't even know, just because he says he has a wife and three kids. And you stay for years, just join up with their life. I could never have done that."
She laughs and shakes out her hair. Little droplets go everywhere. "Well, that's me, I guess. Always jumping headfirst into things. That's kind of what I do."
"So when did you meet Willems?" I ask.
"Oh, well, Willems is actually Anya's father—I told you he was older, right?—and he moved in with us for a while. And he and I totally started hanging together and, oh, Lily, then we hooked up and, well, you know how that is—you want to do it all the time, and we were keeping it a secret, but then one night Anya found out and she just totally freaked on us. And I had to leave. Bad time. Really, really bad time."
"Did Willems leave with you?"
She looks away. "No. He couldn't. Family pressures," she says. "Everybody's, like, totally scared of Anya. I kinda freaked out and—now don't get all weirded out by this, Lily, but I took a bunch of pills. I wasn't serious, you know. It was—"
"Oh, Dana. You tried to kill yourself?"
Her face is luminous in the moonlight. "No. No. I didn't want to die. I just did it to get back at all of them. I know, I know, it was really a stupid thing to do—and, well, I had to do a little time in the hospital—"
"Oh, Dana!" I close my eyes.
"No. No. Don't worry about that. It ended up being the best thing in the world because then Willems came to see me and he gave me a plane ticket to Hawaii. He'd gotten me a job there, working with this old friend of his, Connie, and she and I were going to do event planning together. He said I'd be great at it, and it could give me a new start. It was so sweet of him!"
"And did you do that?" My head is starting to hurt.
"Oh, yeah. For a few years. Connie was this really cool older lady, and we ran this little company putting on events for big corporations, and we dressed up every night, and I drove her little red convertible and looked all corporate and respectable. I had white-blonde hair and a tan. Lived in a hotel in Waikiki. Made a lot of money. I was hot stuff."
I can't help staring at her. "But—but how did it feel? You know, you were so far away from home and everything you'd ever known..." Did you miss me? Didn't you even want to tell me where you were?
"Oh, I don't remember. Fuck all that." She swirls her arms through the water. "I was just having fun. Connie and I dated guys from all over the world and half the U.S. fleet. It was a gas! By the way, I can still hula, if you ever need a hula dancer."
I'm surprised at how dull her eyes look. Maybe it's just the way the moonlight is hitting them, but she seems so distant from the story she's telling, as though it happened to someone else a very long time ago, and she's simply responsible for recounting it. "So," I say, feeling disconcerted, "where's Connie now? You two still good friends?"
"Oh, Christ, I don't know. Probably still doing the same old thing. I got tired of it after a while, and then I made the teeny tiny little mistake of sleeping with the wrong guy—a client's husband, whoops—and she booted me out." She sighs. "It was like I went from being the best thing since sliced bread to being an untouchable in one ten-minute period. Connie was like: 'Out! Go! Get off the island! I don't want to see you anymore!' Which was just as well, because I was like thoroughly sick of that island. I wanted land and space, and the ability to stop driving around in circles trying to get somewhere. I was too, too happy to go, believe me."
"But you were such good friends, weren't you? After those years of working together and building the business?"
"Yeah. Well, welcome to the real world. That's what I've learned about people. You do something even slightly out of the ordinary, make some perfectly innocent little mistake, and they just turn on you. Nobody really cares about anybody else out there. That's just the way it is. You know?"
"Well, but, Dana, I don't think that's true. I think maybe she was just angry, but you could have patched things up if you'd wanted to. Did you apologize to her? Or to Anya, either, for that matter?"
"Apologize? I should apologize for falling in love?" She starts hitting the surface of the water with the palm of her hand, creating little waves. "Come on. Are you really an advice columnist? You tell people that kind of advice? People can't help who they love, Lily. It is out of our control! These guys picked me. And anyway, these women did not want to hear any of that from me. And the men... well, except for Willems helping me out, the men were just scared shitless of the women. That guy in Hawaii—Clem was his name—he just ran to the hills with his tail between his legs, ready to do anything to patch up his marriage. So what that he'd been telling me he was going to leave her? I never did believe him anyway. Who listens to that shit?"
"You got your feelings hurt."
"Hell yes, I was hurt! But then I thought about it, and I realized this was the best thing that could have happened to me. Shit ends, you know? You have to make your exit. You think people are your friends, but how's that friendship if you have to be so perfect to keep them? I'm sorry, but those are not friends. Not real friends."
I'm shivering so hard I can't move. "So, I'm almost afraid to ask, but where did you go then?"
"Again, don't freak. More pills, another hospital, but then I tracked down Willems, who was by then in Texas."
"Still living with Anya and her family?"
"No. Oh, no." She starts talking fast now, with the tone of voice of somebody who's wrapping up the boring ending of a story and just wants to be allowed to get through to the end of it without further questions or interruptions. "He's living with someone new, this little cupcake of a woman named Dreena Sue, about twenty-five years old, and she's just the sweetest l'il ole thang, and all she wants is to marry Willems and have his baby. And so they do that—I help her talk him into it because she's so good for him—and then I lived with them and helped out with the baby when he was born. By then, I knew all about babies from all of Kristoff and Anya's kids. Things were going good for the four of us, but then soon Dreena Sue's brother—that's Randy—moves in with us because he's between jobs. And he's nice, you know, so then Dreena Sue got it in her head that it would be so great and symmetrical, you know, if Randy and I got married, and we could all just be together forever. And so he asked me, and I said yes."
"Wait. You said yes? Did you love him?"
She thinks about it. "Well, I didn't not love him, and also, you know, marriage isn't a fatal disease. You can always get out of it if you don't like it. So let me finish. Anyway, Dreena Sue was planning this wedding for us, and it was going to be a lot of fun. She really was getting into it. But then one day I found Randy getting it on with the dog trainer, and I just thought, very calmly, well now I don't have to marry him. And so I left him in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. Left all of them. Didn't even leave a note."
"Wow," I say.
She paddles around in a circle. I get dizzy watching her.
"And so there you have it: the up-to-the-minute story of Dana Brown," she says.
"Dana Brown, looking for a home," I say.
She looks over at me. "Looking for a party is more like it. Say, when are we gonna have that big bash on the porch?"
***
A few nights later, as I'm scrubbing the sink before bed, she says to me, "So... when you had Simon, did you feel relieved that you'd never have to be lonely again?"
I think back to Teddy handing me the baby to hold in the delivery room and looking down into Simon's calm navy blue eyes staring up into my own, and feeling almost a piercing sense of belonging between us. He was mine. I looked at how tiny and helpless he was, ran my finger along the delicate curve of his ear against the blanket, and felt his rabbity little mouth searching hungrily at my breast, and at that moment I ached with such tenderness that tears ran down my face. But was that feeling relief that I wouldn't be lonely again? I don't think so.
I look up at her waiting for my answer.
"I think," I say slowly,
"that what I felt was that I just wanted to get it right with him. And to make sure that he never felt left out and that he always knew he was the most important thing in my life."
"Oh," she says, and seems slightly disappointed. But then she says, "Wow. You're such a great mom! Who else would think like that?" And she flashes me a big, fake smile and wanders over to the counter to take a swig of her Coke.
Wait, I want to say. Do you want to talk to me about how lonely you feel? But I don't say it, and the moment passes.
Later, in the middle of the night, I wake up with a start and can't fall back to sleep. My heart is racing. Dana, sleeping on the pillow next to mine, looks so young and fragile in the faded bathroom light that falls across her face. There's a drop of spittle at the edge of her open lips, and her dark blond hair lies in a tangle across the pillow. Her hands are curled up near her chin, fingernails still wearing their little chips of green nail polish, chips that are smaller every day.
God, I am so scared for her.
It's because of those stories she told—but no, not the stories as much as her creepy, detached tone when she described her life for the past ten years. All those scenarios, those lifetimes—and she told them as though they had nothing really to do with her; she was simply there, a bystander taking up with other people, living their lives alongside them, and never once wanting anything for herself, never taking action except when she was forced into it. Just reacting.
That, I now see in the clarity of three o'clock in the morning, is what has always made me ache for her, the way she is like a chameleon, willing to be whatever anyone needs her to be, drifting along to something new when things don't work out.
That's the way she was with Momma, too. I remember one day when she was thirteen. I was home from college, and we were sitting on the porch swing, and I casually asked her, "So who are your best friends these days?" and she said, with a big smile, smoothing down a gypsy skirt with sequins that our mother had picked out for her: "Well, I don't like hanging out with girls my age anymore. They're so boring and stupid. Momma's really my best friend."
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