“Dad,” Sasha said quietly.
Lila had both her hands on her throat. Her skin wasn’t the right color. “Why are you doing this here?”
Jamie stepped into the charged space between her parents. Emma probably would have held him back if she’d been able to think right.
His voice was controlled and quiet. “Let’s put this aside for now,” he asked, “in honor of what we hope will be a happy occasion in the future.” For Jamie, she knew, the impulse was always to do the right thing, and when that wasn’t clear, to do something.
Emma looked to her mother’s face for a little bit of sanity, but she didn’t see it.
“Please stay out of it, Jamie,” Lila said in a hard voice.
—
Sasha watched the thing in acute distress, looking up every so often at the suspenseful sky.
She’d wanted to get away long before, but Evie was squeezing her hand so tight, she’d lost almost all feeling.
Squeeze my fingers as hard as it hurts, she remembered Evie telling Sasha when she was little and had to get stitches or shots.
She saw Jamie look from Lila’s implacable face to Robert’s boiling one, his posture rigid. And then Jamie turned his head to his mother getting up from her seat a few yards from where Sasha was standing. He just sagged.
Sasha could only see part of Susan Hurn’s face, but could tell she was unsteady and furious. Jamie’s mother muttered a few heated things at Lila, and then one thing came through loud and piercing. “And don’t you dare tell my son what to do.”
“Susan,” her husband muttered.
“Fuck,” Jamie said under his breath.
Now Jamie’s mother was fully up, waving her arm, accusing Lila of a lot of objectionable things. “Do you hear me?”
Oh my God. Sasha cast another furtive look at Ray.
Lila was too stunned to respond. Her dad’s anger was finally punctured, but it was too late. Sasha could have sworn she saw in Robert’s face a spark of compunction toward Lila. They’d reaped the whirlwind, all right.
In that moment, Sasha hated them and pitied them. But Emma she loved. For Emma she felt worse.
“Drunk bitch.”
Sasha drew in a sharp breath. She heard silverware clatter to the ground. She couldn’t see who’d said it at first, but of course it was Mattie. Mattie, who had clearly been crying.
Oh my God. Sasha put her free hand over her mouth.
Jamie’s sister, Grace, was pulling on her mother’s arm. She was also crying.
Susan Hurn shook Grace off, took a step back, and then shoved the entire buffet table over. China, glass, silver exploded onto the flagstones of the terrace. Party shrapnel flew. Pounds of lobster salad collapsed into heaps of bean salad. Rolls rolled and melon chunks skittered.
Seconds and impressions tangled, but somehow Sasha and Ray had the same thought at the same time. Quinn’s cake with the flowers: cultivated flowers she had grown from seed and wildflowers she had carefully collected, arranged around and on top of the cake, fragile petals torn lovingly into batter. It had Quinn’s special magic in it. It was on the table and the table was going over.
The cake seemed to fall upward into the air as the two of them ran to it from different sides of the table. Sasha had the discordant, slow-motion observation that the cake was not perfectly whole. It was missing one clean triangle of a piece.
Sasha and Ray reached for it at the same time. But neither was fast enough to save it. Sasha watched in despair as the cake turned and fell; air and magic, sugar and butter deflated slowly onto the stones.
Is this happening?
Please don’t let this be happening.
—
Ray was too angry at his mother to be sympathetic to her. For the first time, Robert was trivial to him. He didn’t care about Jamie’s fucking psycho mother or the food on the floor or the broken glass all over the patio. Though if Jamie’s dad took one step closer to Lila, Ray would personally punch him in the face.
He did care about Sasha’s faltering attempts at comfort. He cared about Quinn’s brave attempts to put herself between their idiot parents, so much better than they deserved.
His spirit anguished over Quinn’s beautiful cake, now crushed under thoughtless fleeing feet, tracked to the four corners of the patio and beyond.
Fine if their parents were working out some primal bitterness, but what had Quinn done? Why did Sasha have to watch this? Why did he?
There was a fiery look of combat still burning on his mother’s face. He could catch fire himself and she wouldn’t notice. But Sasha’s lovely young body drooped with sadness. Why was it the people who had no beef suffered the most? Like all slow and terrible wars, it was fought and borne by those who had no grievance, the most innocent enduring the worst.
Because we are the ones who want peace among the grown-ups, and they still want war.
Why did it still have to matter so much to them? To him and his sisters and Sasha? Why did they have to keep loving these people, in spite of their selfishness and their flair for destruction? It would be better if they could just give up. Why did they have to count on them, even now? Would they have to go forward carrying on the same corrosive grudges?
He looked at Sasha helplessly, the toppled buffet table still between them. She was holding Evie’s purse for some reason, standing bewildered and forlorn next to an overturned chair. Dark liquid stained a sash across her mint-green dress. Would she blame him for being on the other side of this disaster? He closed his eyes.
He opened them in time to watch with relief as the Hurns exited around the side of the house. Jamie’s father hunched under some mixture of anger and shame; his mother’s steps were unsteady. Grace’s face was puffy with sorrow.
Jamie made a final huddle with Emma, whispering in her ear before he left to follow his family. His family had to be settled somewhere. There was so much talking down to be done.
How did you tuck all the pieces in so you could pack this into the past? They’d gone far beyond the place where you could try to pretend it hadn’t happened.
Emma was picking shards of glass from the patio and collecting them into a wide wooden salad bowl. When she stood he could see the tears written in black mascara. What a fucking mess.
But where was Quinn?
Robert stood with arms thuggishly crossed by the front door, apparently waiting for Lila and Adam to go through it.
Ray heard shouting on the front lawn. At this point he didn’t know or care whose it was. Cars scrambled across the gravel, down the driveway, escaping onto the smooth town road. Who wouldn’t choose to get out of here?
Except they, the children, even grown, didn’t get to choose. That was the part that was most unfair.
But no, they wouldn’t carry the grudges. Sasha looked up and met his eyes. She didn’t and wouldn’t blame him. He knew that.
Of all the people in the world, he knew how she felt. She knew how he felt. They didn’t need to say anything to know it. In a strange way, they’d never had to.
He wasn’t really thinking when he walked over to her. He had no clear intention in his mind when he stepped around the fallen table, over chairs and plates to be nearer to her. Her physical presence was still strange to him, but he reached his hand toward hers and she took hold of it. The two of them stood there in the middle of it, hands clasped, observing what was left of the kingdom.
He didn’t really care who saw at this point. What were they protecting their parents from? Harmony, God forbid. Compassion and an unusual kind of love.
Their parents didn’t deserve to be forgiven, and yet they would be. Where was the cure for that?
The clouds finally decided to open to rain. It was a relief more than anything. It came down hard and heavy.
Quinn watched the rain beat sideways into the pond, into the sw
imming pool. The steam rose from the ground and the sky came down to meet it.
The rain washed the fallen food on the patio into a single creeping muck. Rain and tears united and returned to puddle, pool, and pond.
Her bare feet sank into velvet wet ground. Her head went hollow when the fat drops splattered down on it. She turned her face up to the sky and let the rainwater bless her eyelids.
Let the pain in. Give it a voice if it needs one.
Now it had one. It was ugly but it spoke. Maybe none of them could feel the change in the air, but she could. Maybe now they could all get on with it.
Mostly everyone had gone now. None of the words or images lingered on the warm stones. She let them all wash away except one: the picture of mint silk Sasha and sport coat Ray standing together in the center of the mess. Small and big, dark and light, left and right. Behind them, she saw that they held hands. All the opposites, everything at once came together. The despair washed away, and that was the thing that stayed. There was the past and there was the future. It felt whole.
How hopeful we were and are. How can we be any other way?
She sat in the wet grass and watched the rain tap the surface of the pond thousands of times. In her mind she saw their two clasped hands.
She could stay like this until the sun dipped down and probably until it came up again. She could repair herself here for a while. But there was still something she needed to do. What must she do? It seemed faint to her now.
—
And then she remembered she owed Myrna a piece of cake.
Sasha’s father was already in the car, her mother told her. Please come now, she mouthed dramatically, twice.
Sasha had tried to keep some order among her impressions, fears, feelings, until they were simply too much. With the press of Ray’s hand against her hand all systems sizzled, shorted, and went blank.
By now her mind was a canvas over which fleeting sensations scratched like rodents: The sting of a blister chewed into her heel by the strap of her new silver shoe. The clutch of Susan Hurn’s white fingers on the table. The flower cake rising gently into a dark gray sky.
Before she could get into the car, Sasha needed to find Quinn. She needed to see her face to know it would be okay. Mattie said she’d seen her. She said Quinn was lying in the grass by the pond.
Rain splashed down as Sasha tripped barefoot across the grass. Soft mud burped under her toes, her heavy sodden dress sticking to her legs, tangling her stride. Dusk had begun to fall. Her perfect green dress took light from light. Now it just looked black.
Quinn wasn’t there. Sasha stumbled back up to the house. She could sense her father in the car, windows closed against the rain, steam clotting the outside world, the air inside so pressurized by indignation the whole thing could blow like a special effect in a Vin Diesel movie. She imagined bits of her father’s Mercedes spread from Manorville to Montauk.
Emma had left in her own car minutes earlier. That was what Mattie had said. And yes, she seemed calm enough to drive. Mattie was going with Lila and Adam. And Ray had been designated driver of Mattie’s car to return Grandma Hardy to her old person home in Oyster Bay.
Briefly Sasha saw Lila in the passenger seat of a car through a window streaming with rain. You are not what I thought. I imagined you better.
She could already feel the urge to reconstruct her father and Lila and all the mythology that depended on them. And yet she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. They didn’t deserve it. Maybe it’s for us that we hold them up, not for them.
We’re a bunch of fantasists, she thought. Reality horned in once in a while and they all tripped over each other trying to get away from it.
Except maybe Quinn. She wasn’t afraid.
Sasha stepped out the front door. Her mother buzzed the window down impatiently. “Get what you need and come on! We’ll meet you at the end of the driveway.”
Who would want to remain at the site of this disaster? Nobody. Run for the exits, put it farther away, let it be somebody else’s problem a little more than yours.
Except Quinn. Where was she?
Sasha found her injuring silver shoes she’d kicked off by the patio. She found her phone and her bag in the kitchen.
On the way across the gravel out front, she finally found Quinn. Quinn sat astride her bike, still in her long tunic, soaked with rain and muddy at the hem. Her hair dripped; the dot in her nose sparkled. A cherry-red canvas bag hung over her shoulder.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m coming back. I just need to take care of one thing,” Quinn called, starting off pedaling into the darkening air.
There was something else Sasha needed to ask, but she couldn’t think what. Heavy leaves weighted branches on either side of the driveway to form a gothic arch over Quinn’s head.
Even now her sister did stand-up pedaling like she was in fourth grade, and it was just another thing that made Sasha feel teary.
Whatever they had all wanted, it was too late. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
—
Sitting in traffic in Queens, a mile back from the Midtown Tunnel, Sasha’s father’s phone rang. He was driving. He was still too angry to talk to his wife or daughter, much less his phone. It stayed in his pocket.
It rang again. He got madder at it. Cursed and ignored it.
And then it rang again.
Sasha sat up straight, her heart accelerating heavily.
“Darling, you should pick it up,” Evie said. “What if there’s an emergency?”
“My God, Evie. What more could go wrong today?” Robert growled.
His words coincided with the onset of the fourth ring, and stabbed fear into Sasha’s heart. In her private religion that was the kind of thing you were never allowed to say.
He lifted out of his seat to fish the phone from the bottom of his pocket.
“Dammit,” he muttered. “I missed it.” He tossed the phone at Evie like he was beyond disappointment or fear.
“It’s a six-three-one number. I don’t recognize it,” she said.
“All of them?”
“Four calls.” Evie waited until he came to a stop to show him the phone. “Do you recognize it?”
Robert squinted at the screen, shook his head. “Play the voice mail.”
Instinctively Sasha put both feet on the floor of the car, put her hands flat on the seat on either side of her. She realized the vibration in her stomach was not just agitation, but her own phone buzzing. She let it go, intent on hearing the voice mail.
Evie pressed Robert’s phone to her head so only faint sounds leaked out. “Robert, pull over,” she said.
Never had Evie given an order to Robert. Never would Robert have complied with one had her voice not sounded like that. Robert spun the wheel roughly to the right through two lanes of traffic and pulled to a stop on the shoulder. Two lanes worth of cars honked at him.
His hands still clutched the wheel even though he’d stopped driving. “Who?”
“It’s a woman from the trauma center at Brookhaven.”
Her father’s jaw was set; his eyes were closed. She was scared for him. Why for him? Why did she imagine it would be his news and not hers?
Evie loosed a strange animal noise followed by five words, quickly: “Quinn was in an accident.”
Real tragedies didn’t happen gradually. They didn’t build you up with foreshadowing like in books and movies. They didn’t culminate with lessons learned or rebalance the moral ledger.
Real tragedies happened in five seconds, in five words. They waited until you were getting herded into the stupid Midtown Tunnel and smashed you in the head. They took what you loved away and left you with nothing.
Sasha heard an unrecognizable voice come out of her own mouth. “Is she okay?”
From Evie’
s face, Sasha was both frantic to know and did not want Evie to answer. Sasha put both hands to her head, like a punch-drunk boxer awaiting the haymaker, protecting her ears from taking in more words.
Her father was a black hole of fear, gravitationally collapsed, too terrible to look at.
“They say we should go to the hospital.”
No, no. We are too far down. We aren’t ready, Sasha thought.
Ray’s parents stayed in their darkened room in the Brooklyn house. Every so often he heard a terrible keening sound from his mother and then silence again.
Emma and Mattie had fallen asleep on the living room couches.
A doctor at Brookhaven had provided a bottle of sleeping pills, and by that means he suspected his sisters had taken a route to temporary oblivion.
How long had they been at the hospital that day? Late afternoon had passed into night, and still it had seemed so abrupt as to make him wonder if he’d imagined it. They’d gone to take care of Quinn and heal her. But by the time they got there it was too late. She was already gone. There was no one there to hold or comfort. There was no one to hold and comfort them. How could you, Quinn?
It was just two mute halves of a damaged, disoriented family staring at each other across the abyss. How are we supposed to do without you?
There were matters for the parents to settle. He wasn’t sure how or when those things happened. He gave sway to his confusion and didn’t dare try to get to the bottom of it. They went to find Quinn and she wasn’t there and wasn’t anywhere. What did you do then? You went home.
He’d considered swallowing a pill or two himself. It was agony being conscious, but if he went under he’d have to wake up again and let the truth of what happened pounce on him in a weak and bleary state. He knew he needed to stay with the truth, keep a wary eye on it as long as he could.
So, no, he would not sleep. He was far too agitated to sit down. He couldn’t be inside and he couldn’t be outside. He couldn’t be.
He walked up and down Carroll Street, noticing the rain but not feeling it. An occasional flash of lightning woke him up and then woke him down again.
The Summer Bed Page 18