Montauk

by Nicola Harrison

  I rarely spoke of Charlie, because people didn’t know him; I feared they’d feign interest and that would feel like the biggest insult to him, so I kept my memories to myself. And here was this man, someone new who had spent hours, weeks, working with my brother, teaching him, helping him. Someone I could talk to. Just the fact of Thomas knowing him gave me hope that I could bring a small part of Charlie back to life. I wanted to grasp on to that. But I was still angry.

  “But the picnic, the dinner I made, up at the top of the light, you’ve had so many chances to say something!”

  “You have every right to be angry.”

  “You let me take care of you. You kissed me.”

  He shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”

  Everything felt so confusing, and yet it made sense. “You worked with him,” I whispered. “You knew him.” I began to feel strangely light-headed and suddenly I couldn’t stop yawning.

  “Are you okay?” Thomas said, coming toward me. “Can I get you anything?”

  “I’m just very tired; please, just leave me. I need some time to myself.” I walked up the stairs to his bedroom, lay down on the bed and curled myself into a ball, squeezing my eyes shut, overcome with exhaustion.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I was there, but when I woke there was a blanket over me. Thomas was sitting on the chair in the corner of his room.

  “You slept for a good long while,” he said.

  I sat up and stared at him.

  “When I was seven or eight and Charlie was nine or ten, we ran away. Charlie had this chocolate bar that he’d been saving. We almost never had chocolate, but there’d been a new shipment at my father’s store. We were up really early for some reason on a weekend and Charlie was cutting it into pieces on a plate so we could share it but still make it last. But every time the knife hit down on that plate it made this loud clunking noise and my father came downstairs and yelled at him for waking him up at five o’clock on a Sunday morning.” I stared at the wall and could see it all happen as if I were still in the room in my parents’ house. “Charlie said we should run away, so we put on our hats and gloves and coats and we packed a bag and we left. I didn’t know where we were going or even why really, but the thought of running away with him was enough. I remember the cold air hitting me as we left the coziness of our house and how he walked ahead fast and when we got to the big hill before the big road I froze. He slid down the icy grass on his feet, but I was too scared I’d fall, so I crouched down and slid on my bottom. It was wet and cold after, but I was worried that if I couldn’t keep up he’d send me back. When I got to the base of the hill he held my hand and we ran across the road and into the woods.”

  I closed my eyes; I could feel my hand in his. I remembered that feeling—a little bit scared that I’d miss my parents but mostly proud that my brother had chosen me as his runaway partner. “We walked in among the trees for what felt like hours, and when we stopped for a break at some point Charlie gave us each a square of his chocolate bar for energy. He asked me if I was okay and I told him my feet were cold. I didn’t mention my freezing behind. He thought about it for a bit, then said we should go back but only because he didn’t want me to get chilblains.”

  I looked at Thomas and he nodded and smiled. “He was a good kid.”

  “When we got home Mom and Dad just carried on in the kitchen as if nothing happened and I remember Charlie being so disappointed that he got no reaction at all. He refused to eat breakfast and stormed off into his room. I felt a little guilty staying in the kitchen and devouring my oatmeal. After that it was as if it didn’t happen. We went back to our own worlds, he went back to his friends and I was back to being his annoying sister.”

  Thomas came over to me and gave me his hand. “You’ve had a shock to your system,” he said, helping me up. “Let’s get you some fresh air.”

  We walked out on the bluffs in silence and sat on the old picnic bench. It was getting late and the sun was starting to set on the horizon, orange and pink shapes glowing through patches of white and grey clouds.

  “Why did you keep the article?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. After I saw you out here in Montauk I went home that night and dug it out of a box in the back of my closet. I already knew it, but seeing his picture again confirmed that it was you.”

  My chest tightened to hear him say it; everyone used to tell us we looked so alike.

  “I still can’t believe you knew him.” I turned toward him and placed my hands in his, feeling a strange sense of gratitude and sadness at once. Gratitude that he’d worked with Charlie side by side, that he’d actually known his personality, his mannerisms, his passion for cars and engines, and sadness that none of that could bring him back. Thomas pulled his hands away, pushed them into his pockets and looked out to the ocean. I reached for them again.

  “Don’t,” he said quietly. “There’s something I have to tell you. I think it’s even why I couldn’t bring him up before.”

  “What’s wrong? I’m not angry; I’m just having all these thoughts, reliving things.”

  “Bea, listen—”

  “No, Thomas, you have to understand I was just so shocked, it was just so unexpected.…”

  “I was supposed to drive the car, Beatrice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The car that we fixed for Mr. Holden. I was going to drive it back. Charlie was supposed to follow behind in the truck from the garage to take me back to the shop, but we were busy that day and he said he could go by himself; he could fit his bicycle behind the seats and ride it back. At first I said no, I didn’t think it would fit, but he made it work, so I let him go.”

  That deep, sinking, wretched feeling rose up from the pit of my stomach. Not because I thought that Thomas was to blame, but because I’d gone over in my head a hundred times all the things that could have gone differently, all the things I could have done differently, the tiny actions or words that could have led to a different outcome. What if Charlie hadn’t taken his bicycle to the shop that day, what if he had caught the cold that I had the week before and stayed home sick, what if he’d taken a lunch break earlier or later, what if a part hadn’t come into the shop on time and the car still needed work, and here I was being given one more reason. It was overwhelming.

  “I should have been driving. It should have been me.”

  “It’s not your fault, Thomas. We could all blame ourselves; we could all come up with reasons for him to still be here with us.”

  He wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly until the sun disappeared and the sky turned a deep, dark blue. The clouds cleared and the moon lit up the rocks on the cliff like spotlights.

  * * *

  I don’t remember much about the funeral. What I do remember comes to me in fragments, like shards of broken glass shattered on a kitchen floor. I’m on my knees feeling around for what’s left, under the table, between the cabinets, in the corners.

  The indecision over what to wear. I took out the few black clothes I could find and laid them on my bed, not wanting to bother my parents with such an insignificant chore. My mother borrowed a black cape from our neighbor at the last minute and I thought it strange to consider such a thing as we walked out the door, just as it was strange that I’d agonized over my outfit. But we were powerless that day, in control of absolutely nothing except the clothes we chose to wear.

  The procession of cars driving at a snail’s pace following the men walking slowly through our small town with the casket on their shoulders. Everyone knew us and everyone knew Charlie. People stopped and stared, their somber faces echoing ours. The constant rain, fat heavy drops, black umbrellas forming a cloak above us.

  My father reaching up and touching the casket as the men carried it into the church, and me wishing he wouldn’t do that. The workers from my father’s grocery store attending and my father repeating, “He should have worked with me; he could have had the family
business. I told him those cars were no good.

  “He could have gone to college like our Beatrice,” he said as if I weren’t standing right next to him. “We told him we’d pay for it; why would he want to be a damn mechanic? I told him those cars were dangerous. He should have worked with me.”

  The church service was a blur, but I remember that we sat in the front row and it felt as though it were for someone else’s family, not ours. At the cemetery, standing over the hole in the ground where they’d lowered the casket. My parents each sprinkled dirt on the wooden box and my mother buckled under the weight of it all, my father and I holding her upright and shuffling her back to her seat. I looked up and saw our old school directly across the street and I pictured Charlie and me passing in the hall and me feeling proud when he gave me a nod of recognition.

  The absence of my best friend from elementary school. Her mother kept apologizing that she hadn’t come back from college for the funeral. We were barely seventeen; we didn’t know how to act or what to say in situations like these.

  The cold unfriendliness of our house that evening, where we gathered after the burial. The darkness creeping in from the windows, the cheese sandwiches, the coffee, the lemonade, the bourbon, the awkwardness of trying to act like an adult, a lady, when all I wanted to do was to hide under the covers in my big-girl bedroom.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to go back to the Manor and be alone, so we slept in the living room on opposite sides of the room as we had that first night when Thomas was injured.

  “Why did you leave here and go to Pennsylvania anyway?” I asked. It was late and we’d already turned the lights out.

  “I’d been thinking how solitary my life had become, how I’d be alone forever if I stayed at this lighthouse. So when my friend Hicks sent me a letter saying he needed someone to work at his repair shop I made a hasty decision to leave this behind. Someone’s always after this job, so I let them have it, but the man who took over from me was a drunkard, sleeping through his shifts more often than not. They were begging me to come back days after I left. But I liked working with Hicks, especially when your brother and his friend started working with us. It made me think of my son a lot; he was just a little one then, but I thought about him growing up and me not being around him to show him how to work on a car engine and that sort of thing. Your brother was so eager to learn, he wanted to know everything. He didn’t just want to know how to fix something; he wanted to really understand how it worked. He was such a smart kid.”

  “He could have gone away to college, you know,” I said. “My father saved up enough for both of us to go to college, but Charlie didn’t want to. That wasn’t what the other boys in our town were doing. But what if he had gone, what if he had just been a little bit more interested in mathematics or literature? If he’d wanted to practice law, he’d be here with us now.”

  “You told me earlier that you can’t keep going over and over all the what-ifs. You’ll drive yourself mad.”

  I closed my eyes in the darkness and listened to the faint sound of the ocean waves rolling in and crashing, rolling in and crashing, one after the other like the ticking of a clock whose hands keep moving forward even when you want time to stand still.

  23

  The Manor lounge was abuzz with excitement about the End of Summer Masquerade Charity Ball. It was to be the biggest event of the summer and everyone wanted to be involved. I wavered back and forth about going or not going to the planning meeting that evening—in the end I decided it would do me good to get dressed and have a distraction.

  The room purred with chatter and clinking champagne glasses and if you didn’t know about the magnitude of the upcoming ball you might have thought this was the event itself. The women sashayed across the lounge in floor-length chiffon and silk. Even Dolly was dressed to the nines with a gorgeous lace headpiece.

  A quiet ringing came from the front of the room. Jeanie was trying to get everyone’s attention and call the meeting to order, but if they could hear her, no one took any notice.

  “Ladies,” clink, clink, clink. “Ladies!” she shouted, now standing on a chair in an ivory empire-waist dress. “Ladies, may I please have your attention? We are about to get started; please take a seat.”

  The women followed her orders and found seats at the round dining tables, turning their chairs toward her. No food would be served until business had been concluded, she had already warned us, so everyone drank the bubbly being passed around instead.

  “As you know, the end-of-summer masquerade ball is just a few weeks away and there’re lots of things to do and decisions to be made. In cases like this many hands make light work, so I’m asking each and every one of you to step up and help make this ball a raging success, not only for ourselves but for the local folk who will be joining us.”

  There was a halfhearted round of applause and light chatter started up again. I heard a few women question the reasons for inviting the locals and another wonder out loud if she should be worried about things being stolen from the Manor.

  “This is our chance to thank the locals for making our summer so comfortable,” Jeanie continued. “From the porters here at the Manor, to the lifeguards at the beach, to the tennis coaches.” She fluttered her eyelashes and received a few giggles from her audience. I rolled my eyes; she’d used that line before and the same few women had laughed. “Dolly has so kindly offered to donate all the masks, she’s having them made in the city and we will be handing them out to everyone who walks through the door, locals included, so it will be a true evening of elegance and equal footing, except of course for the staff who will be working at the event.”

  She went on. “As you know, this is a wonderful charity event and the proceeds will go to the Betterment of Montauk Fund. It’s really important that we give back to the community that we have so enjoyed this year and will continue to enjoy for years to come. City folk will each be kindly asked to buy two tickets at the door, one for themselves and one for a local, and there will be an auction with some lavish prizes.”

  I felt as though I’d been walking around the room in a daze. I was thinking about my brother and reliving the accident all over again, but strangely relieved because Thomas had known him. And then there was the kiss. In the midst of all that I’d discovered, I kept coming back to the kiss. The thought of Thomas’s lips on mine made my skin still tingle. It was ridiculous, but I fantasized about him attending the ball, brushing past him in the company of all these people, his hand catching mine; it made me feel light-headed.

  “What I’d like to decide on tonight is what aspect of Montauk we wish to improve with the funds raised from the event.” Jeanie’s shrill voice brought me out of my daydreams. “We should be advertising it heavily to ensure participation and generous donations.” She let those last few words settle across the room that she surveyed making sure that everyone understood they were expected to give. “And now I would like to introduce Clarissa Baxter, the head of the fundraising committee.”

  Everyone gave a round of applause as Clarissa approached the front of the room; they were expecting her to talk, but instead Jeanie gave her a nod and continued with her speech. Some women at our table started whispering loudly, clearly uninterested in where the money was going, more interested in comparing their ball gowns for the event.

  “Shhh,” I whispered at them across the table. They turned their eyes, starting up again almost immediately. I hadn’t really been all that enthusiastic about charity work back in the city, but now that I had gotten to know Montauk and the people who lived there year-round I began to feel quite passionate about the whole affair and wanted it to be a success. I imagined how it might affect Elizabeth’s family directly and the other kids I’d seen in the village and wondered if some of the money would go to preserving the lighthouse or fixing the erosion at the cliffs. This was far more appealing than some of the other causes Harry and I had supported over the years just for the sake of attending a fabulous s
oirée.

  “Ladies, I can’t hear,” I said when the chatter didn’t die down, so I got up from my seat and moved closer to the front of the room, taking Clarissa’s empty seat.

  “So after much discussion and deliberation we have narrowed our gift choices down to three options, and they are: a gazebo and a grand statue on the village green of a fisherman—with a sign above him that reads: ‘Welcome to Montauk.’” I let out a little snort and the rest of the table turned and glared. I thought Jeanie was joking, but clearly she wasn’t, so I straightened my face. “A new tennis court near the boardwalk—that’s my own personal favorite; how fabulous would it be to jump straight into the ocean for a swim right after a hot, sweaty tennis lesson.” I began to feel my temperature rise and I raised my hand abruptly. This was some kind of joke, surely.

  “Questions at the end please, Beatrice. And the third option is an additional row of docks at the yacht club so we can accommodate more boats into the harbor.”

  There were some oohs and ahs and the chatter began to start around the room again.

  “Ladies, ladies, before you resume your chitchat we need to make a decision and take a vote on the best use of the funds raised at the ball.”

  I shot my hand up into the air again and when Jeanie took no notice I stood.

  “Excuse me, Jeanie?” I said loudly. The room fell silent. “Is this a joke?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Jeanie stared at me with disgust; suddenly everyone’s eyes were on me, but there was no going back now that I’d spoken. “I’m sorry, but these are the most ridiculous gifts I have ever heard of.”