He descended all the way to the stench of the Gowanus Canal before he realized where he needed to go, and then he walked up to the Atlantic Avenue station and caught the night’s last train bound for Montauk.
He walked up and down the aisles. There seemed to be only a few people in each of the cars. Yes, he was annoying, but he couldn’t make his legs bend him into sitting.
He sent a text from the train. It was hard to imagine that the words from his phone would go up into space and come down in her phone. But maybe they would. And maybe she was feeling as alone as he was.
The town names were a strange childhood poem to his ears, but on this night they took on a ghastly aspect. Wantagh, Seaford, Amityville, Babylon, Islip, Speonk.
His mind flashed on a story Quinn once told him about a skunk from Speonk. He could feel his face folding and he cried through the back three cars of the train. He wondered if Sasha knew that story.
He pictured Sasha’s eyes meeting his across the waiting room at the hospital hours before. He couldn’t hold the picture for long.
How could this be?
He had the instinct not to see or do any more than was necessary, because every experience would mix with this night, this horror, and would be infected by proximity. And every experience tomorrow and tomorrow. And maybe every experience for the rest of his life would be poisoned by happening in the world without Quinn in it.
He got off at East Hampton. The station was empty. There was one cab outside and the driver was asleep. He started to walk.
The wind got stronger as he made his way south toward the ocean. After a while he couldn’t feel his feet anymore. He wondered if the numbness would climb all the way up his body.
He promised himself to keep an eye on the truth, but it was hard. What if it wasn’t really her? What if she wasn’t really gone? What if she could still come to?
What if he’d just imagined that it happened and some realer reality could come along and save them from this one?
His mind kept rolling back time. What if she hadn’t gotten on her bike? What if she’d left a few minutes earlier or later? What if it hadn’t been raining? What if she’d taken a different way?
What if the driver hadn’t been a fucking idiot? What if he hadn’t drunk margaritas at a garden party? The cops declared him under the legal limit, but still.
What if she had fallen into the grass instead of the street? How could she have fallen onto the street?
And then he had to get his eye back on the truth, because if it got away, if it crept behind him, it could take him down and maybe he wouldn’t be able to get up again.
—
Sasha didn’t tell her parents she was leaving. She’d had the idea even before she’d seen Ray’s words appear on the screen of her phone. She just snuck out. Not like her parents would notice at this hour, on this day.
She couldn’t look at her dad again tonight. She was scared for him. He doesn’t know how to do a thing like this, she found herself thinking.
Not that she did. But she knew she loved Quinn beyond reason. She understood that Quinn was their secret special magic. Quinn was the story and the storyteller. Without her they would just float around not making sense anymore. They would go empty. Their tanks might still feel full of her now, but they would drain quickly and without her they wouldn’t be filled again.
In her grieving heart Sasha knew her father had yet to realize all that. He’d been caught up in pierced noses and Indian handloom, erratic hours and uneven grades. He mistook those things for what mattered. “Parents of teenagers and young adults get hung up on the absolute dumbest things,” she’d overheard a teacher say once, and she’d thought of it often. Her dad obsessed over Quinn’s nose to get a little distance, maybe. So he could try to love her a little less as she grew up and away from him.
And now all there was left for him to do was fall and fall and fall, each collision a new trauma, while Sasha was already waiting for him at the bottom.
She hurried down to the street and let herself out quietly. There was nothing of Quinn in this house. She had climbed the stairs and crept the halls, craving something, but there was nothing. Quinn had her own room here, but in the two years since Robert and Evie had bought the house, she had never slept in it. Quinn would have sooner slept in the park on a bench. She probably had. Quinn had eaten dinner in the dining room maybe a handful of times and never looked comfortable during one of them.
Whatever was left of Quinn from their old apartment on Eighty-First Street had been replaced, reupholstered, upgraded. Sasha needed to hold on to what there was. Whatever smells and tastes and sounds still held some of her sister, she needed to absorb them before they released the last traces.
The final Long Island Railroad train of the night had already left, so she took the car out of the garage. The attendant looked surprised, but asked no questions. She drove through the rainy streets like just what she was: a New York City girl who’d had her license for less than a year.
Her father would have a heart attack if he knew what she was doing, but there was not much left to attack on either side.
She more or less knew how to go. Maybe she’d planned this escape before. She tapped the destination into the navigation system. She’d done that for her dad on different trips. He had an unreliable sense of direction.
She let it guide her over the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge. She couldn’t pass through the Midtown Tunnel again.
She wasn’t wearing shoes, she realized. She must have taken off the mint-green dress at some point after they got back from the hospital and put on leggings and a flannel shirt, but she had no memory of doing it.
It felt good to drive. Because she was poor at it, it soaked up most of her autonomic attention. There was hardly another car on the dreaded Montauk Highway.
She was hell-bent on getting there, and as soon as she pulled into the driveway, she was overwhelmed by despair and had no idea what to do. She draped over the steering wheel and went boneless.
When she got out she found the front door was locked, so she picked her way across the stones and followed them around to the back.
—
Ray heard a car pull in. His mind wasn’t working right, so it didn’t alarm him or interest him as it might have. It couldn’t be her. His entire being was clenched into a raisin at the base of his head. It didn’t possess curiosity or hope or conventional fear.
He paced the grass. His legs were worn stumps barely connected to his torso. It occurred to him, vaguely, that he was still wearing his new shoes he’d gotten for the party and that they were tearing his feet to shreds. He felt dizzy pulling them off. His feet were blistered beyond feeling. His toenails would invariably turn black and fall off. He didn’t mind that so much. Mainly he just couldn’t stop moving, because then and if and if and then. He didn’t know if he could keep going, but if he collapsed then the truth would get its chance to sneak up when he wasn’t ready. He knew it would.
He trudged down to the bank of the pond and cooled his feet. He picked up a flat, mossy stone and threw it as far as he could. That felt all right. He picked up another and then another. His arm was so loose in the joint he half expected it would detach from his body and fly into the pond too.
A time to cast away stones.
What was that from? From the Bible. He’d heard it at a funeral. His grandfather Harrison’s funeral.
He threw another. He threw it so hard he imagined it soaring all the way across and pinging the house on the other side. He heard it plunk in the water like the others.
—
Even in the dark Sasha saw the shapes of ruin all around the patio. She hadn’t forgotten, but it had gotten buried under a thick layer of ash. The memories started like an orchestra tuning up. They didn’t turn into music but got uglier and more cacophonous.
She stumbled
over a wineglass. She picked up the two pieces and stared at them. And then she threw them down into a hundred pieces. She took a deep breath.
Next in her path was a white china plate. She picked that up and threw it too, flat down with two hands for a sparkling blast. Another plate winked at her like a big white eye. She picked it up and smashed it. Glass bits bounced off her legs. She took a step and some of those same glass bits burrowed into her bare feet. The plates were at her mercy, her feet at theirs.
She was ready. What else?
Ray heard the shattering of glass in the direction of the house. He heard more. His legs drew him up the hill toward the sounds.
The raisin inside his skull was not curious or conventionally afraid or capable of surprise. Was it her? It took him a few seconds to arrange the facts. Sasha, sum to his zero, was here at this house in the dark and she was beating the shit out of the china. The raisin was capable of enthrallment.
It made so much sense. It was the only thing there was to do. He stumped over to the patio and picked up the first plate he saw. He threw it down with a thrilling vengeance. Shards flew so high he felt them ding his forehead.
Sasha froze, cake plate in hand. She stared at him. He stared at her. By the faint solar lights he took her in from fierce face down to bare white feet.
A proud acknowledgment passed between them. His agony rose and reached out for hers. The set of her chin showed signs of struggle. His own face started to fold. He couldn’t let it go yet.
He smashed another plate instead. She let loose a lemonade pitcher against the house like she was Clayton Kershaw. They moved around each other in a strange ballet of demolition, conversing in crashes.
The sun finally peered up from under the horizon and saw what they had done. They stopped. The rain was over. Everything that had been whole was broken.
Wordlessly she found the big trash bags in the pool house. He got the heavy-duty broom and went about sweeping like a man possessed. By the first sun he’d seen the blood all over the patio from their feet, and he couldn’t bear to watch her walk on it anymore.
For the next stretch of time the ballet continued, silently, in reverse. Piles of broken glass, chunks of lobster, sodden paper goods went into heavy lawn bags. Tables and chairs turned back upright. With the hose on full he washed away the rest of the blood and the food.
Together they stacked the bags neatly in the garbage shed. He admired her work ethic as he had done many times at the Black Horse Market.
He followed her across the grass to the little rise overlooking the pond under Quinn’s favorite linden tree. You could still see remnants of her old tree fort if you looked up at the right angle.
She stopped and so did he. Even though he was only a raisin he found himself taking her hands. Courageously she looked up at him and then he was lost. He saw the grief in her face and he couldn’t hold back any longer. Her face crumbled and so did his. His anguish came out so raw he didn’t want her to see.
He lost his legs and found himself kneeling on the ground. She put her arms around him, buried his head in her chest. He held her waist and wept.
At some point she got down and they eased onto the grass. They lay there holding on to each other for a long time. Her sobs made a counterpoint to his.
Eventually they both got quiet. She turned over and he felt her heart beating under his hands. Her lovely body curled against his. He pressed his face into her neck, just behind her ear. That smell, her safe, soft smell, which he’d only gotten in faint, secondhand doses and yearned for year after year, now passed into and around him, shrouding him in mercy.
He let consciousness scatter and muscles go. The truth could sneak up and clout him, even fatally, upon waking, but he would be here with her.
—
Sasha’s eyes opened. She surfaced out of sleep carefully, slowly, knowing to fear what she would find when she broke through.
Her head was on the grass. Ray’s arms were around her, his face against her neck. This was Ray. She could tell by his heaviness he was still asleep. She kept very still. She took inventory of his parts and hers. Her feet were wound through his calves and they burned.
Slowly, carefully, she connected the pieces that had brought them here. She didn’t let the coldest fact get to her in words right away. But the feelings she couldn’t keep away. Her eyes filled and spilled over again and again. She tried to keep very still. Tears dripped over the bridge of her nose down into the grass. She tried not to shake.
The sun was halfway up the sky and birds were growing rowdy. Her parents would be panicked. In the frankness of morning she knew she couldn’t add to their pain.
Very gently she rotated her body to face Ray’s. He stirred in sleep and pulled her closer. She hugged him tenderly and hard. She tried to memorize him.
She dared lay a kiss on his jaw, another next to his ear. “I’m sorry I have to go,” she whispered as she extricated her limbs from his.
“Please,” he murmured, and so she held him patiently through the gauntlet of waking up.
Later he was a bit awkward getting to his feet. He wanted to walk her to her car. They both hobbled. They didn’t try to talk about anything, which was a relief.
He watched her pull out of the driveway. He brushed at his eyes.
She felt a cord that stretched between them pulling taut. She left him there, hands in his pockets, hair going in all directions.
The cord stretched and stretched, until it vibrated like a banjo string as she drove on. It pulled hard on her heart, but it did not snap.
“I can’t get married anymore.”
Emma had been ruminating over it through her many hours of half sleep, going in and out of consciousness, in and out of dreams with no shape and days with no time. There was something she and Jamie had been trying to protect, trying desperately to hold on to, but she couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t even remember what it was.
She’d told Jamie not to come over, and he waited a few days. He sent groceries from Fresh Direct. He sent a giant box of fruit from Dean & Deluca. Then finally he sent himself. He held her on the couch in the living room of the house on Carroll Street.
“We don’t have to think about that,” he said to her.
“I don’t want to see you for a while. I just want to stay home and lie in my bed.”
“Okay. I understand.”
“I don’t want to think about the future or anyone in it.”
“Okay.”
He was holding her closer than ever and it felt good. But it also felt confusing and forward-leaning and reminded her of things she didn’t want to have to think about.
“That means you untangling from me and leaving,” she said.
“Right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Next week?”
“No. I don’t know. I can’t think about it. I don’t want to make any decisions. I just know I need a break and I need you to listen to me.”
“Okay.” He put his forehead against her cheek. “I don’t want to but I will.”
“Thanks.”
“The thing that’s hard is that my mind is here with you all the time. I want to help.”
“I know, but you can’t right now.”
He sighed. “Okay. I’ll stay away until you’re ready for me to come back.”
“That’s good.”
“In the meantime will you promise to call if there’s anything you need? If there’s anything I can do? Anything at all, no matter how big or small.”
“I promise I will.”
“Okay.”
“So now you have to take your arms away,” she said. She was crying again and so was he.
“All right. I will.” He did. “Em?”
“What?” sh
e asked. He wasn’t moving.
“You have to take your arms from around me too.”
—
In and out of her long hours and days of dreaming, Emma thought about the tiny apple tree given to her father by her mother on the last birthday he had while they were still married. It was late October, so they left it in its box in the shed for the winter, to plant in the spring.
But sometime after that was when things started coming apart between her parents. Spring and summer came and went and nobody opened the box. It just sat month after month. “Well, it’s long dead by now,” her father said when another winter passed, but she noticed he didn’t throw it away.
Emma was probably five or six at the time. She imagined how her mother felt each time she went for a rake or shovel and saw the tall skinny brown box unopened. It was another bitter stalemate between her parents with another innocent victim languishing inside.
Quinn was the one who finally dragged the box out of the shed. Emma helped her open it. They both shut their eyes, scared to see the sad remains. The sapling did look scraggly and hopeless, but Quinn wouldn’t let them throw it away. She got Adam to help dig a hole at the edge of the woods. They undid the roots very carefully and put it in the ground, even though they knew it was dead.
Are we planting or burying? she remembered asking Quinn.
Same thing, Quinn said, and she sat with the little scrap of tree for hours and talked to it.
Maybe it was then that Quinn embarked on her peculiar belief system about growing. Every day they ran out to check on the small tree first thing and last thing.
Within six days two tiny green tendrils pushed out of the ends of two skinny brown twigs. She remembered the damp quiet of the morning air, the sound of their breathing, hers and Quinn’s, the wonder. The next day there were more. By the end of the second week pale green leaves sprouted from every dry brown stick.
After a month they brought their father out, each holding a hand. “That’s not the old bare root apple tree,” he said.
The Summer Bed Page 19