The Summer Bed

by Ann Brashares

  “I don’t remember. I think we were both too surprised to say much. I guess it was kind of awkward.”

  Ray looked young and confused and sadly honest, the way he said it. He was clearly struck by Sasha.

  The shadowy feelings were hovering in Mattie’s ears, reminding her that Ray might have noticed, if he got past Sasha’s dark, slumpy clothes, her bowed head, and her turned foot, that she had an exceptionally curvy little body and the prettiest face of all four sisters. Mattie felt like an evil stepsister sometimes, wanting people not to notice Sasha’s buried charms in the presence of her own flashy ones. And the shallow fact was, they usually didn’t.

  Mattie remembered once confiding her insecurities about Sasha to her friend Sophie Marlow. “Seriously? Mattie, you are way prettier, way funnier, way cooler, and way, way more popular than her,” Sophie had said, interpreting Mattie’s concerns in the basest possible way. Mattie never hung out with Sophie anymore, actually, because Sophie was more viper than friend and had the habit of telling you what you thought you wanted to hear but actually just confused you and made you a worse person.

  Ray and Mattie walked in silence for a block, both of them preoccupied and a little stifled. She felt frustrated that they weren’t getting to any of the real things.

  “So how’s your boyfriend?” Ray asked. “The tall fellow?”

  Mattie jabbed an elbow into his rib. “Shut up,” she said laughing.

  Mattie did hang out with John Harman sometimes, but he was not her boyfriend and he was notably not tall. It was a sore point that he was at least three inches shorter than her.

  “I saw him on Eighth Avenue and he was wearing heels.”

  “Ray! He does not wear heels, he wears boots.”

  “Boots with heels, then.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  They admired the chocolate éclairs in the window of the President Street bakery and then lapsed into silence again.

  “So what did you think?” Mattie finally asked.

  “Of what?”

  “Of Sasha?”

  “Oh. Right. I don’t know.” Up and down went the hoodie zipper. “She seemed familiar. She looked familiar.” He considered. “It seemed strange that we’re strangers.”

  She considered too. “Familiar how? You mean she looks like us?”

  “Like Emma and Quinn, for sure.” He laughed and pretended to step on her foot. “You don’t look like anybody.”

  Sasha sat aimlessly on a chair at the kitchen table in Wainscott, watching the family go by. She was agitated by Ray feelings, so she needed to get out of her room. Granted, it was his kitchen too, but not in so powerful a way.

  She let her mother and Mattie come and go. When Quinn walked in she opened her mouth.

  “Can I tell you something strange?”

  Quinn stopped with a carton of milk in her hand and turned around. “Yes.”

  She idolized Emma and she admired and feared Mattie, but Quinn was the one she craved, for whom she felt the fearful hope in her mouth whenever she called Quinn her sister, always warding off that ghost word “half.” “I met Ray last Saturday night.”

  Quinn’s eyebrows shot upward. “My brother Ray?”

  Sasha felt nicked by the wording. She nodded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was at a party. He was at the same party. I didn’t realize it was him until we were standing outside on the sidewalk with a couple of friends.”

  Quinn looked at Sasha’s face carefully, nodding.

  “I’ve never been close to him before.” Sasha had to push herself to explain. She resisted talking about Ray head-on, even saying his name, for fear of giving away too much. “I only ever saw pictures from when he was young or saw him on the opposite side of an auditorium.”

  Quinn got a glass out of the cabinet, a pensive look on her face. She poured milk. “I guess that’s true. ‘And never the twain shall meet.’ ”

  “The twain did meet, though. On the corner of Eighty-Eighth and Lexington.”

  —

  Later Quinn came out to the patio and sat at the foot of her creaky chaise, turning it into a seesaw. Sasha scooted up to make the balance.

  “I guess it’s easier for everyone to keep you and Ray in separate worlds.”

  “That’s how we’ve always done it,” Sasha said philosophically.

  “Because of Lila and Dad.”

  Even that everyday locution was hard. Quinn always referred to her parents from Sasha’s point of view instead of her own. Emma, ever precise, said “my mom and our dad.” Mattie said “Mom and Dad,” though the mom she meant was not Sasha’s mom. There was something wrong about each of the ways. These were two people who could no longer be captured in a sentence together.

  “Of all of us, you and Ray are the only two who aren’t siblings or steps or related at all. You aren’t anything to each other, but you are my brother and sister.” Quinn pressed her thumb to her mouth, thinking. “It’s a weird way to have a family.”

  Sasha was quiet for a long time. “Do you think we would like each other? If we knew each other?”

  “I love you. I love him,” Quinn said simply. “I think you would love each other. But that math has failed me before.”

  Sasha nodded.

  Quinn’s sad face was never intentional like Mattie or her mother’s, but it was the most distressing. Quinn bore a child’s love for her parents no matter how they hated each other, how ugly the scar they made down the center of her life.

  Kids come first. Both adult halves of the family shared the mantra. It was one of the few agreements, and neither of them meant it.

  “When Ray was little I would stand with him at the edge of the pond,” Quinn finally said. “He would spend hours catching tadpoles and frogs with his hands. The next week you would come and we would collect things in the woods. You would make these beautiful little terrariums. There were so many times like that when I wished I could be with the two of you together.”

  For some reason Sasha felt like crying.

  Quinn lowered her gaze to Sasha’s face. “I think I would love it if you and Ray knew each other. You two are opposites in most ways, but you make two halves of a whole. It scares me a little. I’m not allowed to want the two halves to come together. But I always do.”

  —

  “You want to what?”

  Mattie looked dangerously pleased with herself, standing in her tank top and Pink Floyd pajama shorts in the middle of Quinn’s bedroom.

  Quinn sat up in her bed. “You’re talking about next month? This coming August?”

  “Everybody has an engagement party. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Quinn’s eyes opened directly onto her thoughts, mostly because she didn’t think to shutter them.

  Mattie came and sat cross-legged at the end of her bed. “I think the best method is jumping in, you know? Because why let everybody build it up for a whole year? Why not start breaking down the barriers now? Get some of the drama out of the way. Give us all a little practice before the actual wedding?”

  One nice thing about Mattie was she tended to answer her own questions in case you didn’t. She was happy to carry on a conversation without your assistance.

  “Here at the house?”

  “Yes. Come on. Will you help me?”

  Quinn pushed the covers off, folded her legs under her. “Have you asked Emma?”

  “No, I want it to be a surprise.”

  Quinn looked at her seriously. “I think that is one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had.”

  Mattie smiled. “And that’s saying something.” She jumped off the bed and walked to face the mirror over the dresser. She cocked her head and made her mirror face before she turned back around. “Okay, fine. So we’ll tell them.
We don’t know Jamie that well. And we don’t want to scare him away forever.”

  It hadn’t escaped Quinn that she and Mattie had just become “we” in this enterprise.

  Mattie paced and considered. “Do we want to scare him away? Maybe we do?” she mused. “No. If Emma hasn’t scared him away all on her own, then maybe we should keep him. Anyway, I think I like him.” She opened Quinn’s closet and stepped in. “Well, I’m glad that’s decided, then,” Mattie continued from inside the closet.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “Nothing. You have nothing I want.” She came back out. “Except storage space. Can you ask Mom?”

  “Ask her what?”

  “Or tell her. Can you tell Mom about the party?”

  Quinn sat at the edge of her bed. “Why?”

  “Because she can’t say no to you.”

  “Sure she can.”

  “Well, she can’t say yes to me.”

  “And Dad?”

  “Can you tell him too?”

  “Seriously?”

  Mattie looked sheepish, but it wasn’t sincere. She was reckless.

  “I don’t think I want to.”

  “I know.” For the first time Mattie allowed Quinn to see the intensity under the request. “But will you anyway?”

  Quinn watched Mattie flounce confidently from her room, knowing her sister would do what she asked.

  It was precisely because of what it would cost that Mattie wanted her to do it. Because her parents would understand that, too, and on the strength of that, maybe they wouldn’t say no.

  —

  “This August? One month from now? Are you serious?” Emma looked around to make sure Francis wouldn’t catch her talking on the phone while at the bakery counter.

  “Yes. It gives us enough time to plan the party, but not enough time for them to dig the trenches and plant the explosives,” Mattie explained.

  Emma shook her head. It was one thing to imagine her parents in the same room next summer. This had a terrifying nearness.

  “Mom and Dad will never agree to it.”

  “They will. Quinn is asking them. She never asks them for anything.”

  “Does Quinn think it’s a good idea?”

  “She said as long as nobody gets surprised.”

  “I’d have to ask Jamie right away. His parents would need to come from Ohio.”

  “Ask him.”

  Emma considered for a moment. “Listen. I’m flattered and honored you guys want to do this. But…why do you want to do this?”

  “Because we love you. We want to celebrate. Everybody has an engagement party.”

  “Not with our family.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time to get them on board. Maybe it’s time for them to get over themselves and put their kids first.”

  Emma smiled ruefully. “Matt, that’s crazy talk, and you know it.”

  “But it shouldn’t be! That’s the thing!”

  Emma laughed and then got serious again. “I don’t know.”

  “Here’s another way to look at it: we get the worst of it out of the way before the wedding.”

  This made a certain kind of sense. “Okay. I’ll talk to Jamie. I gotta go.”

  —

  “Do you remember a guy named Jonathan Dawes?”

  Mattie had made her way into her father’s study unobtrusively.

  His back was to her. His laptop was open; one phone was in his hand, another on the desk. One earphone was stuck against one ear, a newspaper on his lap, a cup of coffee a few inches from his elbow. Two wide screens mounted just above eye level showed the changing prices of commodities, mostly in red.

  Her father barely registered her. His gaze ricocheted from screen to screen. He always left the door to his study open, but people didn’t usually step through it.

  It had taken a lot to get the question out the first time. She couldn’t relax until she’d asked him, but she didn’t really want to ask him. In fact, she was relieved that he wasn’t paying attention. She didn’t want him to pay attention. It would be a big relief to turn around and walk back out. But then how was she supposed to get any peace?

  Suddenly he was looking at her. Her silence always caught him as her voice did not. “Matilda. Did you say something?”

  She pulled at a string trailing from the hem of her cutoffs. “Nothing important. I just…”

  “What?” Now he was curious. Once he was curious, you were stuck.

  She could make up some dumb thing about her debit card, or she could ask again. “I ran into this guy at the Black Horse. He was kind of familiar, and I wondered if you knew him.”

  “Who?”

  She yanked at the string until it made a groove across her palm. She had to say it now. She felt like a bomb disposer, but she had to. Clippers out, wires in hand.

  “Mattie?”

  “His name is Jonathan Dawes.” Snip.

  His face showed nothing.

  “I guess…he’s big into…surfing.” Her volume descended with each word.

  Bomb disposers didn’t always know right away whether they had succeeded or failed. She didn’t know. She didn’t even know what constituted success or failure in this case. She remembered Emma’s old policy: “Don’t ask Dad a question unless you already know the answer.”

  His eyebrows rose. His mouth compressed a bit. He cleared his throat but said nothing.

  “I think he taught us to surf when we were small. Do you remember that at all?”

  His body was still. Absolutely. Phone still poised in hand. Commodity prices fell behind his head. Was he thinking? Was he remembering? Was he distracted? Was he mad at her?

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember him?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember us learning how to surf?”

  “No.” Was he glaring at her? Was she being paranoid?

  She snapped the string from the hem of her shorts. “Okay.”

  He rotated back toward his screens, hardly seeming to move.

  “Dad?”

  Nothing. Phone down. Head bent.

  “Okay.” Now she knew which wire she cut: the one that caused the explosion. Slow and quiet maybe, but now unmistakable. And in some terrible way, maybe that was success. Because now she also knew she hadn’t come in here to fix anything.

  His posture was strange to her. She didn’t know what to say. He never turned his back on her. She felt like she should say something, but she didn’t know what. Her face felt hot and her palms were wet, and she wished she could put the wire back together and rewind the detonation.

  She was his pink girl, his yellow-haired baby. She rode on his shoulders. She climbed on his head. She’d never been around him and not known how to be.

  She walked out of his study.

  “Close the door, please,” he said. It was the voice he used with the pool cleaner when there was scum on the surface. It wasn’t the voice he used with her.

  She closed the door, but she couldn’t make her legs walk her away from it. She stood there trembling.

  She heard something roll and then crash. Something involving glass. She put her hand on the knob and listened to quiet. She could feel them both breathing on either side of the door, but far apart. Her heart was racing, but she didn’t dare go through the door again.

  On Sunday afternoon Quinn brought Myrna Chapman a brown bag of yellow Saturn peaches. She liked to stop by there once or twice a week after she finished in the Reeses’ orchard, bringing some of whatever the trees had best to offer that day.

  Myrna had been her grandma Hardy’s babysitter growing up and later her friend. She lived in a Victorian house near the road in the village and had once kept the most beautiful garden Quinn had ever seen.

&nb
sp; Quinn was always turning up at Myrna’s when she was small, when her own house got loud. Myrna would give her chessmen cookies and grown-up black tea and teach her about flowers.

  Quinn was a pest when she was tiny, a student when she was a little older, and a real help by the time she was about twelve. Myrna won the village award for her garden one year “hands down,” as everyone liked to say at the time, and she had insisted on sharing it with Quinn at the presentation.

  “Mattie is throwing an engagement party at the house for Emma and Jamie this August,” Quinn announced, cutting up two of the peaches and putting them in a bowl in the middle of Myrna’s small kitchen table. “I got the job of asking my parents.”

  Myrna looked amused. “And what did they say?”

  Quinn sat down across from her. “They both said maybe, but they will both say yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Mattie decided we’re going ahead with it anyway, and Jamie’s parents agreed to come all the way from Ohio. Jamie is my dad’s star employee. My dad has to be there to greet the Hurns as father, boss, and host. And once my dad and Evie agree to be there, then my mom has to too. She will hate it, but you know her. She has to represent her side of things. She couldn’t abide my dad acting like it’s his party and his house and his daughter.”

  Myrna nodded. “Right you are.”

  “Same old,” Quinn said.

  Myrna’s fingers were twisted and thick-knuckled now as she reached for a slice of peach, but her pleasure was pure in the taste of it.

  “Will you come?” Quinn asked.

  “Of course,” Myrna said.

  Myrna hadn’t been invited to their house for many years because it was presided over by Grandma Hardy, and Grandma Hardy had judged Myrna for getting divorced when people at the club didn’t get divorced yet. Twenty years later Grandma Hardy herself was divorced and remarried and living in Oyster Bay, saying things like, “Why in God’s name did I wait so long?”

  “I’ve never seen my parents in a room together,” Quinn said. “Not that I can remember.”

  “I have.”

  “How were they?”

  Myrna tipped her head, remembering. “Hard to say. Your grandfather was drunk and acting like a lout—the housekeeper had burnt the roast, I think. A truck from the volunteer fire department rushed in because the fire alarm went off, and your parents tried to keep Emma quiet.”