They nodded solemnly.
“Can’t be.”
“It is.”
He walked away from it shaking his head, chalking it up to some childhood vagueness.
At the end of the summer Lila saw it too. “Your father finally planted it?”
Emma looked at Quinn, half frozen, and Quinn nodded faintly. It was the only wisp of a lie she’d ever known Quinn to tell.
—
Several times a day for several days in a row Emma walked down the dark hall and listened attentively at her mother’s door. Sometimes the sobs scared her away. Sometimes the silence scared her more. Today she heard a sigh, and it sounded like an invitation.
“Mom?” She pushed the door open a little of the way.
“Emma?”
“Yes.”
“Come in.”
Her mother sat up in bed. The shades were pulled down, but not the whole way down today. Lila wore a faded T-shirt and yoga pants. Her blond hair was going in the direction of dreadlocks.
Emma got in bed next to her. “Can I rub your back?” It was what Lila always said to them—when they slept late and she crawled in, when they stayed home sick from school.
“Okay,” Lila said, and turned onto her stomach, her arms pinned under her.
Emma glided her hand back and forth, using her mother’s most comforting technique.
“What’s it like out in the world?” her mom asked faintly.
“Same as it was. Mostly. For other people. Less than it was for us.”
Lila nodded into her pillow. “It will always be less. But will it be something?”
“It will be something.”
“She was so easy to love. I took her for granted.”
“We all did.” Emma began to cry.
“She was the reason I became a midwife, you know.”
“I know,” Emma said.
“She was born in my bed. In this very bed. Can you believe that?”
Emma knew these stories, but she could sense it gave her mother solace to tell them again.
“There was an amazing, beautiful snowstorm the night she was born. Your father was desperately trying to shovel out the car. He wanted to call an ambulance, but I told him no. What could be less conducive to labor than an ambulance?”
Emma didn’t know.
“So instead he found Monica, who lived on Union Street at the time.”
Emma knew this was the Monica who also delivered Mattie and Ray, and became Lila’s mentor and eventually her partner.
“Quinn was born in her caul. It was like a shimmering veil over her head and face. Monica had never seen a caulbearer with her own eyes before. She said it was a sign.”
“Of what?”
“Of a special destiny.”
“It was.”
“It was.”
Lila’s breathing got slower. They lay together for a long time in silence until she thought her mother might be sleeping.
“How is Jamie?” Lila asked softly. She wasn’t sleeping.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of everything.”
Lila turned back over so she could face her. “You really love him, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I can tell.”
“I wish you’d noticed that before.”
“Let me tell you, so do I.” Lila closed her eyes. Tears spilled out of them, onto the sheets.
Emma propped her head up on her elbow. “Yesterday I said to Mattie, ‘I like myself better when I’m with him.’ And you know what Mattie said?”
Lila shook her head.
“She said, ‘I like you better when you’re with him too.’ ”
Lila smiled the ghost of a smile.
“It’s true. I admit I am a softer, calmer person when he’s around.”
“You should tell him that. You need to be with him.”
Emma sighed. “That’s a little funny, coming from you.”
Lila propped her head up too. “God, I know.” The tears resumed. “I recant. I regret. So many things. Day after day I lie here and that’s what I do.”
There was so much in those words, feelings just laid bare, that Emma started to cry too. Her mother wasn’t even trying to protect herself anymore. “Oh, Mom.”
“I know, sweetheart. I know.” Lila patted Emma’s hair, smoothed it back from her face.
It was what Emma wanted, for her mother to finally lay down arms, but in another way, it was scarier still.
“I’m sure you don’t need to go to work,” Ray’s mother told him as he came into the kitchen of the Wainscott house, finally shaved and wearing something other than his Batman pajama pants. He knew Lila wanted to keep holding on to them for as long as she could.
“I know, but I want to. Emma went. Mattie went.”
“They’re crazy,” Lila said.
They’d spent nine days in a dark house in Brooklyn before his mother could face going to Wainscott. There had been calls, letters, flowers, food deliveries, and a few visitors, including George Riggs, who’d briefly stopped in from California to pay respects. Then they’d spent four days in a bright house in Wainscott, during which Lila left the house exactly once: to visit Myrna. It was a brave act and made such a sad picture in Ray’s mind he couldn’t even ask how she was.
Now it was Monday, ten in the morning, the first day and hour to rise out of the murk. He needed to get away from his parents.
“They need to do something. I do too. I need a change of scenery and something to do with my hands.”
At work, Francis and the others offered awkward condolences. It seemed like no one around town could quite look at him, like they were unsure how to confront a sadness of that size.
Ray was listless in the stockroom. He smoked a cigarette by the dumpsters with Julio. It was awful and probably the best part of his day.
Eventually he got home and made it upstairs without talking to anyone. He held his breath as he opened the door to his room. Every time he walked in he smelled her smell and felt her presence.
I don’t know what to do, he told her silently.
There was a pitiless yearning in his heart. A constant ache. It came in waves, and some were unbearable. So black and mysterious were the events of August 9, he’d begun to doubt they had actually happened. He only knew Quinn was gone and so was Sasha.
He couldn’t distinguish the missing Quinn from the missing Sasha, but it felt slightly more hopeful to miss Sasha. He couldn’t distinguish between his pain and Sasha’s. It was the same pain, the same loss. Thinking of her both compounded it and offered a strange comfort.
He turned on the shower. He got in and turned it hot, preferring the thick steam and the sting of it on his back.
He thought of Sasha in the shower. He thought of Sasha everywhere. Her hands turned this same stubborn cold knob. Her torn-up toes stood on the same slippery ceramic as his torn-up toes. He had a lot of complicated feelings. A few unbidden ones were admittedly lustful, but not all.
He sensed they were both prisoners: of their grief and of their families and of their families’ grief. He guessed she, like he, had parents who could not let her out of their sight. He wondered about guilt sometimes too. He got out and stood in front of the mirror. This mirror got to see Sasha; why not him?
He reached out his index finger and wrote words in the condensation. He opened the door to the cool air of their bedroom and watched the words disappear.
—
The sky had turned an eerie yellow color over the Reeses’ farm and the wind kept changing direction. Mattie had already moved all the produce and baskets under the shelter of the awnings.
“Do you want me to put everything into the storeroo
m for tonight?” she called to Matthew.
Matthew was hurrying from the barn with two giant rolls of tarp. He had an anxious look on his face.
She fell into step with him. “What’s going on? It feels like a big storm, doesn’t it?”
His face was still cloaked. They could still barely look at each other. “Supposed to be hail. Which is a fucking disaster.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to cover everything I can.”
“By yourself?”
He threw the two rolls down by the pumpkin patch.
Mattie knew Matthew wasn’t older than Emma—they were born the same month, in fact. She’d seen the picture of the two tired mommies with their two fat babies. Lila once said Carly stayed around long enough to sit for that picture and not much longer. But sometimes Matthew looked like he was forty years old, if not a hundred, and that made her sad.
She knew he was alone. Patsy and lame Dana had already left for the summer.
Mattie remembered a night a few years before when Quinn hadn’t come home from the farm. Dinner came and went. It was past midnight and her father was pacing the floors when she finally came back from the Reeses’, soaked and exhilarated, telling the story of what you do on a truck farm in the case of hail.
“Can I help?” Mattie asked.
“You weren’t supposed to come at all today,” Matthew said.
She knew Matthew had been trying to protect her in her grief. It was Mrs. Reese who’d called and asked her to come to work. Mrs. Reese didn’t say it, but Mattie knew he was knocked back too. He was struggling badly. They all were.
“I don’t mind.”
He was shaking his head, walking back to the barn. “It’s heavy, messy, endless work.”
She kept following him. Please don’t let me off easy for once. She trailed him back to the barn to get more sheeting and back out to the orchard. “I know I’m not Quinn,” she said in a wavery voice.
He stopped finally and turned to her. She didn’t know his face was capable of such open despair. He nodded. “You can help if you want,” he said.
Mattie just kept following him around for the first part, trying to get the idea of it. She might have been annoying, she recognized, but she might have been more annoying pelting him with a hundred questions. She carefully watched him cover and stake the first row of melons. He let her help on the second. On the third he let her do one side and end while he did the others.
The rain began teasingly. It started as warm slaps and quickly got cold. On the next run to the barn he brought her a jacket that smelled like him. As she pulled it on he looked skeptically at her feet. Metallic flip-flops and aqua-blue toenails. “What size?”
This was a figure she had never spoken aloud since she was fourteen. Not to her friends, not to her sisters, not even to her mother, and certainly not to the most handsome young man she ever knew. She looked up at the sky. What was there to fear when the worst things happened anyway? “Eleven.”
“Awesome,” he said in perfect sincerity, running back to the barn again. “You can take a pair of mine.”
Mattie kept her head down and worked. Her arms ached and her feet hurt. The skin of her hands was raw. Under that lurked a pain somewhere deeper than her muscles, and it was caused by all the preening she’d done among the zinnias and the blueberries for the last four summers, being delightful at the front where the customers came.
She posed at a job, posed at earning money, battled it out with stupid Dana for who could dress cuter and flirt more. I hate myself. No wonder Matthew shook his head and walked the other way. This was Matthew’s life work, his family’s work, his livelihood. She suffered a visceral self-chastisement, a long-overdue reorientation, as she worked beside him.
When he was ready to trust her with the low crops, he ran to the orchard. She sensed he was most worried about that.
The rain came hard and turned the ground to mud. She slid from row to row, twice falling so extravagantly she splatted in mud up to her forehead. It was a small farm, she knew, but God, it felt big tonight. Eggplants, cauliflowers, sweet corn, cucumbers, summer squash. Quinn’s tender babies, nurtured by Quinn’s mystical hands, now helpless and crouching under the fast-moving sky. Mattie’s heart went out to them, and to herself a little too. We miss you. We need you. How could you leave us?
She had become Matthew’s shadow, his alter ego, his twin in a matching coat and work boots, racing back and forth between the barn and the fields. Row after row after row: grape tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, blueberries, blackberries, more melons. Pushing in the stakes to secure the covers got harder as the ground got softer.
There were still four rows of blueberry bushes in front of her. She felt a frenzied, desperate energy powering a deep concentration. She had no sense of time anymore. She couldn’t bear the idea of a single berry, a single stalk going unprotected. She could go faster, and she did. The wild inefficiency of her regular mind gathered behind one simple purpose.
She began to doubt the ice would come and then the ice came. Just little pits and sparks whizzing by at first, almost playful. The next time Matthew ran out of the barn he carried a bicycle helmet and he thrust it at her.
“Seriously?” she said. It was just as well he didn’t hear her. She buckled the strap under her chin.
Oh, if Dana could see her now.
She couldn’t feel her body anymore. Just the plastic cover stretching under her fingers. She resented the sharp little pings of ice. How would that feel to a blueberry?
When she couldn’t finish the last row she stopped and huddled three young bushes under her body and waited. She was so intense she scared herself a little, but that self and this new blueberry-mother were wide apart.
I don’t know who I am anymore, she’d said to Matthew. Were truer words ever spoken? The sound of ice clumps falling from the sky thunking against a borrowed bicycle helmet in the middle of a field, with mud up to her eyebrows and her body stretched over blueberry bushes, was a novelty indeed.
Matthew found Mattie there sometime later. “I think the worst of it is over,” he said cautiously.
She nodded, untangled herself from the bushes, straightened her helmet. She tried not to weave or stagger as she walked toward him. You couldn’t cede your dignity altogether.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded.
He looked over the fields with a look approaching disbelief. “You did an unbelievable job.”
She started to shiver.
“I don’t even know what to say.”
She nodded again.
“If I’d had two of myself tonight I wouldn’t have done it as well.”
She shrugged. With shaking hands she took off the helmet. It was hard to make any words come. She finally got hold of some and forced them out. “Y-you didn’t know I could do it.”
His whole face opened again and he looked no older than the twenty-two years he was. He covered the few feet between them in one large step and put both of his arms around her. He held her shivering body and buried his tired face in her hair. “I didn’t know you at all.”
It was hard to come back here. They all felt it.
It had been almost three weeks. After the first frantic night, Sasha had promised her parents she would stay put, and she had.
Summer was over. Lila and her family had already come back here the week before. So that was maybe why they needed to do it too.
Her dad slumped around the edges of rooms like an extra in a movie. His posture had changed since it happened. He said his body didn’t digest food right anymore. His stomach wasn’t at all fat now. It was the vacuum into which the other parts of him began to sink.
Evie was as nervous as an insect. “He’ll get through this. We all will,” she tended to say nervously, which tended to make Sasha fear t
he opposite.
The only structure holding up their lives was the family memorial they planned for late September.
Early that morning Sasha had overheard her father trying to arrange the details with Evie over his untouched oatmeal, as though it could be just them doing it. And suddenly zing, through the muck of Sasha’s mind, sliced the sharp imperative: haven’t we gotten anywhere?
Sasha pulled to a stop in front of the kitchen table. “You have to call Lila and plan it with her,” she told him.
He looked up at her in confusion. No fight left, just the dust still swirling after defeat.
Later that morning, as her father walked the edges of rooms, she saw a gradual dawning in him. At noon she overheard her father’s hushed phone conversation with Lila. Sasha listened for bitterness and recrimination in his voice, but he just sounded tired. Together they agreed on the particulars.
It was hard for Sasha to walk into her bedroom and confusing to stay there.
Ray had tried to make the bed. It was almost certainly the first time in their joint tenancy he had done that. Rusty smile muscles worked at her mouth. The bed looked like the work of a five-year-old.
She was scared to think about him. She was scared to remember the feeling of their bodies curled together for those few hours of sleep on the grass. Because what if it was the fruit of a bargain she hadn’t meant to make? What if she’d unknowingly traded her greatest dread for her oldest wish?
Her cheap, stunted, nonmystical religion required that she offer up her happiness in return for a little less disappointment, a little less fear. Suffering was how you put money in the karmic bank. There were always more bills to be paid. No joy was allowed to come out of this.
But Quinn had a different religion. A brave and expansive one. Don’t be scared of the pain, she would have said. Don’t avoid the ways you feel. Don’t bargain away your happiness. Let joy come out of this.
Sasha now sat gingerly on the bed, their bed, breathing deep late-summer air, feeling Quinn’s presence and allowing thoughts of him to come. “I wish we didn’t keep dividing,” Quinn had said to her the day of the accident. She wouldn’t let Quinn’s death be another reason to divide.
The Summer Bed Page 20