The afternoon bells chimed, one lovely and dismal note. AP French class for me. AP history for Skye.
“Let’s not go,” I said suddenly.
Skye looked up from her food, bemused at the novelty of this idea. As if skipping class were far more radical than showing up stoned out of her mind.
We snuck back out to Percy Hill Road—hunching low when we walked past our classroom buildings—and headed down toward the orchard. Skye came back to life once we were off school grounds: as though every surface not belonging to the school belonged to her. She seemed to grow two inches taller. Her shoulders lifted and evened.
“Oh Catherine, my Catherine,” Skye said, pirouetting down the dusty road. “I forgot to get you high. I’ve hoarded all your drugs for myself. So rude of me.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
But watching her featherlight stride, feeling responsible for her, I wished for the same energizing numbness. To feel the visible breath through my lips a little more sharply, smell the air’s pine and wood smoke a little more wholly. I longed to be Skye, and I longed to escape her. I looked forward to my birthday and solstice. The coming Christmas break and all the time Susannah and I would spend together, with Skye in DC and me in Old Lenox: enforced exile my only chance of breaking her spell.
11
SUSANNAH HAD ALREADY told me everything about her first visit to Venezuela, but at home for winter break, as plans for our trip seemed to become more real, she told me again. This time she started with the birds. To her, they were what mattered most. Not the streets of Caracas, with its hand-painted storefronts. Not the umbrella-shaded tables at the hotel in Ciudad Bolívar, or the stilt cabins at the biological station on the Orinoco Delta. Not her father’s absentminded attention—wandering off, taking his field notes, consulting with the other ornithologists. Not even her anger at him, for abandoning his family.
Peter Pan, Susannah used to call her father, deriding his tropical estrangement.
But that was before she visited him there. Before she saw the an-hingas, with their prehistoric poses—still as statues in the cover of the mangroves. Exploding into parachutes of wingspan when she took a step closer. The scarlet ibises and the toucanets.
Susannah always swore her great-grandfather was a full-blood Apache. She and her older brother backed up this claim with a spattering of dark freckles across their noses and an almost Asian slant to the eyes. Slight builds and heavy black hair. The Venezuelans took them both for natives, until they spoke their high school Spanish.
SPOON-FED EVERY LAST bit of information, I can see Susannah’s trip to Venezuela almost more clearly than she—who had only her own internal view. Whereas I know exactly what she must have looked like on that puddle jumper from Caracas, the pilot insisting she leave her brother in back and sit next to him. I can see her making her way from the back of the plane, pushing her hair behind her ears. Gorgeous teardrop of a girl, men forever imploring her to smile.
“Smile,” the pilot said, with a flash of crooked white teeth. “The view will be beautiful.”
And Susannah, resting her hand on the copilot’s yoke, took in her breath at the great, green fecundity—the snaking rivers and swooping frigate birds.
Stepping off the plane, she would have felt torn in a hundred different directions. After weeks of refusing this trip, this consolation prize of a visit, she had acquiesced only with the greatest reluctance, terrified she’d encounter a more ominous reason—the real reason—her father had left.
Now he stood waiting for them on the tarmac. His fair, thinning hair and sunburned brow nothing like hers or her brother’s. Charlie gave their father a hug, but Susannah refused to greet him with any kind of warmth, frowning at his new beard. She regarded his female assistant with suspicion and surprise: chubby and pimpled, the woman presented an unlikely temptation. Susannah refused to frown at her. Accomplished at the silent lording of her own beauty, she simply offered her hand, along with the sort of smile that would let the woman know every imperfection had been registered.
Susannah’s father used to be an investment banker. He used to coach her brother’s baseball team: clean shaven, pacing the dugout. Mr. Twining, the kids called him, never dreaming he might have a first name.
On weekends and vacations, he walked local nature trails with his binoculars. He hung bird feeders in the backyard. There was never any warning of his own impending flight. Susannah had felt sure, despite his protests, that a woman had lured him away. She was not convinced that a place could have that kind of power until she arrived there herself.
Those two weeks in Venezuela, she waged war with her own melancholy: the deep, damp buzz of the jungle. An uncomfortable and primal love, not only of the surroundings, but of her father—whom she’d determined to despise, not only for leaving them. For bringing them here, showing it to them. Excluding their poor mother and allowing them in for just this barest moment. Never thinking to ask them to stay.
Susannah felt outmatched, unloved. And dizzy with ineffable desires.
HE INVITED HER to check the mist nets—the two of them walking out by the river toward twilight. Her brother still fishing with Eduardo, the cook’s husband. Susannah followed him through the cahoon palms and watched him unravel a yellow warbler, its bright wings flapping in useless protest—brief liberation—before he stuffed it into a tiny burlap sack.
“Hush,” he whispered to the bird, holding the bag next to his face. It wriggled and pulsed like a slapstick kidnap victim. “We’ll let you go soon.”
“I’m sure that’s very comforting,” Susannah said.
Her father sighed and leaned against a palm tree, the shade of tropical leaves fanning out in banana-shaped spikes at their feet. Skin flaked off his nose, exposing new pink skin—freckled and vulnerable.
“Susannah,” he said. “My girl. When are you going to understand I still love you.”
“Is that what you think this is about?”
She’d braided her hair too tightly. Her temples ached with the pull against her scalp. She had expected there would be less of him—that he would have grown thin and gaunt, living on mangoes and love. Instead there was a new paunch, a strange and incriminating testimony to contentment.
“I hate the way you act like you know things,” Susannah said. “What’s going on in my head. You ran off. You left us. You love this place more than us.”
And I understand why, she wanted to say. She waited for him to deny the accusation, but he just took off his baseball cap and bunched it up in his hands. An old man’s nervous and supplicating gesture.
“You think you still get to be this authority,” Susannah said. “It’s smug. It’s hypocritical.”
She stepped out of the shade. The sun assaulted her eyes, sharp white light, obfuscating her view of him. She could hear the bird, the intermittent and melancholy flap of its wings sounding like dismal surrender.
“That assistant,” Susannah accused. “That girl at the airport. Is that who you’re with now?”
“Of course not,” he said. His voice strained with a world-weary plea, the sort Susannah used to hear when he argued with her mother. “It isn’t about that kind of thing. Not at all.”
“You expect me to follow the rules,” she said. “To get good grades and listen to what you say. Remember how mad you got, when you found pot in the basement? And that was nothing. That was nothing compared to this.”
“I got mad at you,” he said. “But I didn’t stop loving you.”
She squinted through the sunlight. This bald plea struck her as flatly pathetic. She wanted him to talk about something else, something unemotional. The bird’s wings flapped their feeble protest. It wasn’t like her father, not to give her the name of the bird, tell her the species. She put her hands over her ears.
“What are you doing, Susannah?”
He stepped forward and put his hands on her wrists, gently trying to pull them away. She kept them clasped firmly. He had done this on purpose—cornered her al
one, away from the conspiratorial glances of her brother.
“I don’t want to know,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”
She pulled herself out of his grasp and ran down the path to camp.
THAT NIGHT, AN HOUR or two into her sleep, Charlie shook Susannah awake. She blinked in the darkness, the form and scent of her brother instantly familiar but everything else strange. Wooden walls the wrong texture, mosquitoes flying effortlessly through their slats and knots. The moving leaf shadows nothing like those cast in her room at home. The brine off the river smelled primal and fetid—like gallons of mulch and seaweed. So weird and wrong, she wrote to me later. Like one of those dreams where you keep waking into another dream, except this waking was real. It felt like opening my eyes and finding myself in a past life, or another dimension. It didn’t feel like the right century. I felt like I’d left myself behind.
“Dad’s doing lines in the dining hall,” Charlie said.
“Of coke?” Susannah said. Her voice sounded small and unformed. She watched her brother nod. His black hair swayed above narrow shoulders. Above his head, the river cast prismic shadows onto exposed rafters. “It’s like being on a boat,” she said, and he cocked his head, assessing her—not sure if she were still dreaming.
They walked together through the palm and cocoa trees. Susannah had hurriedly donned khaki shorts and a too-big oxford shirt but had forgotten shoes. She stepped gingerly in the leaf litter, afraid to feel snakes slithering beneath her bare feet. “Is he with a woman?” she asked Charlie.
“No, he’s with the cook’s husband.”
“Eduardo,” Susannah said, annoyed that Charlie didn’t know. “His name’s Eduardo.”
They climbed the wooden stairs to the dining hall, one low lamp burning behind the mesh windows. They could see their father sitting at the head of the table, Eduardo to his right, the two men taking turns gesticulating. They spoke Spanish; Susannah was surprised that the foreign language didn’t slow her father down, his words tumbling and effusive. A small round hand mirror—powder blue, like something a woman from the fifties would carry in her purse—lay between them, neat rows of white lines on top of it.
Outside, just above the porch’s eaves, a flurry of dark birds darted in circles through the dim light’s shadows. Susannah reached out and grabbed the hem of Charlie’s T-shirt as he pushed the door open.
Their father stopped midsentence and stared toward them. A quick glance down at the coke, as if he thought he might have time to hide it.
“Children,” Susannah said, in a stern, mocking voice. “I can explain.”
Her father stared past Charlie, at Susannah. The room looked smaller than it did at mealtimes, without the students and biologists to give it mass and volume. A few wooden picnic tables with long benches. Low bookshelves under the windows, sparsely packed with field guides and board games. Susannah imagined the missing pieces inside those tattered American boxes, the mismatched dice, and crunching Scotch tape holding the boards together. She glanced across the narrow counter that separated the dining hall from the tiny kitchen. Tin pots and pans hung from the ceiling. Utilitarian white plates, just like the ones at school, stacked in neat piles of varying size.
The restless drugs had filled her father with unfamiliar intensity. She remembered him leaving her house every weekday morning of her childhood—coat and tie, briefcase in hand. When had he become this errant camp counselor? No doubt her father saw this question staring back at him. I imagine Susannah’s ethereal form surrounding the unapologetic scorn in her eyes. And I can’t help but feel a sharp pang of sympathy for her father—realizing, perhaps for the first time, the formidability of his own daughter.
Susannah felt a faint ache in her palm and realized she was still clutching Charlie’s shirt, her fingernails digging through the worn fabric. She let go, reaching from behind her brother, and held out her hand toward the coke. Waiting for her father to hand the straw to her.
I see the moment clearly as if I’d been there myself, standing beside them in the close remove of night. In the tropical country—so far from Old Lenox and the family they had believed themselves to be. Their mother so many miles north, pacing the rooms of their house in abandoned bewilderment and growing bitterness.
Susannah stepped around Charlie and sat down on the bench across from Eduardo. He smiled at her, one gold square where a cuspid should have been. She smiled back, the warmth an intentional affront to her father.
“This coke,” her father said, in a hoarse voice. “You can’t believe how good it is, how little it costs. We’re living like kings here.”
Susannah glanced around the shabby dining hall and laughed. Outside, one of the dark birds fluttered down, a sideways flicker, its wing scraping against the mesh window. Hearing a high sonar screech, she realized they were not birds at all but bats.
Charlie walked into the kitchen and grabbed four beers from the refrigerator. He handed one to Susannah. Condensation melted luxuriously beneath her fingers as she gripped the bottle. The beer tasted bitter and watery. Fantastically cold.
“Like kings,” she repeated wryly. Her father handed her the straw.
Susannah knew as she bent over the mirror, that this night would last well into morning. That her father would feel closer to them than he ever had before. That he would disclose all manner of motive and inner workings: laying bare his new life, his new self. And she didn’t need to hear a word of it. This hour of night, this wooden room. She hadn’t come to her father’s world. He had come to hers. There was nothing here that he could tell her.
Let him confess, she told me later. There was only one piece of information she wanted now. The rest could drift through the mosquito netting into the night air, to dart and flutter with the bats and bugs.
SEVERAL NIGHTS LATER, while Susannah and Charlie bought the coke behind the Laundromat in Ciudad Guayana, an oropendola trilled its otherworldly cry from the branches of a trumpet tree. Susannah walked away from the transaction, away from the Venezuelan men in American T-shirts. Too dark to see the dirt beneath her Adidas, but it felt red, sandy. The night pressed into her chest the way only the warmest, closest climates can. And she listened to the oohwaleo-oohwaleo of the bird echo through the dense sky, closing her eyes to the forgiving pulse of the tropics.
“I guess I should have been scared,” she wrote to me. “But the two men, Rico and Alan, were so nice. They invited us back to Rico’s house for dinner, but we had to meet my dad at the restaurant in Bolívar. Not that he would have cared if we never showed up at all, but of course Charlie was stressed about getting caught, because Dad would have died if he knew we were using his connection. So we said no, and Rico gave us a loaf of banana bread his wife had baked and told us if we ever came back we could stay with him. The money we paid is nothing to what it would cost here, but I think it will support his family for a long time.”
They bought three ounces, which Susannah zipped in the inside pocket of her jacket and carried onto the plane. Through the window, she watched her father wave good-bye from the tarmac. He looked so forlorn and hopeful. It made her think of that story by Truman Capote, “A Christmas Memory,” and for a moment she expected him to run forward and board the plane—demanding to know whether she and Charlie loved him. This vision, too painful to consider very long, gave way to her own incarceration. She imagined him visiting her in jail, dropping his head into his hands and blaming himself.
Burn this letter, Susannah wrote at the bottom.
But of course I didn’t. I jammed it into the hanging wall file where I kept all my friends’ letters. I still have it somewhere, tumbled in an old steamer trunk in my mother’s attic, its crumbly spiral edges turned to yellow.
ONE MORNING IN JANUARY, I told Susannah about the dream I’d had on Skye’s beach. The same landscape that haunted all my postnuclear visions: a scorched earth, branches burnt bare, white fallout flurrying through the air like deadly snow. In the dream I had ridden Bloom to the top of a ru
ined hillside and discovered body after lifeless human body, all laid out in neat and endless rows.
“Was I there?” Susannah asked.
We stood in the tack room, returning our saddles after an afternoon ride. Two scraggly barn cats mewed, pressing themselves against Susannah’s legs. She knelt and picked up the smaller one, holding it to her chest. I wiped a green stain from the bit of Bloom’s bridle, not able to remember if Susannah had been among the lifeless forms.
“You were,” I said, knowing she’d be upset if I said I wasn’t sure. “Everyone was there.”
Skye, and my mom and dad. John Paul. Eyes closed, empty faces toward the sky. I stooped to touch their shoulders, to see if they’d wake.
“And then I woke up, for real. Alone on the beach.”
“Poor Catherina,” Susannah said. “All by herself at the edge of the world.”
Through the barn windows, the sky had gone dark in the brief time it had taken us to unsaddle our horses. I poured Cat Chow into the crusty cereal bowls by the door. We each took a sugar cube from the jar my mother kept by the grain barrels and walked back to the stalls.
“Do you want to stay for dinner?” I asked Susannah, as Bloom licked my hand in search of more sweets.
Susannah’s mother had a new boyfriend in residence. “Bald and Boring,” Susannah had pronounced him. “It’s weird,” she’d said. “This new guy is like the person my dad should have grown into, if it weren’t for the birds and the coke.”
I wondered if this meant she preferred the less-traveled path her father had taken, but she still referenced him with curt dismissal. He was coming in a few days, to stay at the Old Lenox Inn. I was invited to go out to dinner with him, Susannah, and Charlie.
“You’ll be my force field,” Susannah said. These days, she wanted little as possible to do with her family, even Charlie. Except for Christmas, she had eaten dinner at my house every night since we’d been home.
We fell in step beside each other, our boots crunching through the snow as we walked back to the house. School had been out two weeks. For me, the two things that felt most like home were spending time with Susannah and riding Bloom. My brother and sisters had all been back for my birthday, and the holidays, and then returned to their various lives in the week after Christmas. Strange, being the youngest of four: growing up in so much chaos, safe under the radar while longing for attention, until one by one they all left. When my sister Claire went to Waverly, three years ahead of me, I wandered through the big, empty rooms. The most startling aspect of only childhood was finding myself alone with my parents’ marriage—the icy realm that had seemed an incidental matter of course suddenly the uncomfortable and unavoidable everywhere. Whereas before my siblings had been my primary objects of allegiance, I found myself shifting loyalty toward my mother. The two of us against him, our calm and sunny countenance against his perpetual scowl.
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