The Dismantling

by Brian Deleeuw

  A month later Amelia and Ray were dating, and by the early spring they were inseparable, locked into the cage of teenage first love, the rest of the world rendered irrelevant and blurry. Kippler now liked to come over in the early evenings, between Amelia’s return from school and Michael’s return from work. Simon would listen, kneeling at the wall between their two rooms, his ear pressed to the plaster, as Kippler crushed up his Ritalin pills and cut the powder into lines on Amelia’s desk. Kippler and Amelia would snort the lines and smoke cigarettes and tune into Hot 97, and sometimes, as Simon listened, they’d move over to the bed. He could still hear them then, their talk growing quiet and throaty, punctuated by Amelia’s laughter. He’d turn up his own radio to drown them out or ostentatiously slam his door and clomp down the stairs to watch TV in the den, but none of that helped. He knew what was going on anyway, and it was killing him. After a few weeks, after Amelia had started snorting Ritalin nearly every evening and most mornings before school, after she’d started cutting her afternoon classes to meet Kippler earlier, after bags started to appear under her eyes and flesh to drop off her bones, Simon could not ignore the fact that he was doing nothing to help her, and so he confronted Kippler on the beach, alone, and told him that he needed to stop bringing his pills around. Kippler laughed in his face and said, “Or what? And how do you know what we do anyway?” Simon had no answer. Kippler told Amelia, of course. This was a week ago; she’d barely spoken to him since.

  Here, in front of the television, they could finally have the conversation Simon had been waiting for, the conversation he had, without entirely realizing it, been trying to provoke. But he was unable to translate his feelings into words. All the things he needed to say to her—how he was scared she wouldn’t need him anymore; how he hated their father for making him do the work of parenting in his place; how he was jealous, not only of Ray and his claims on her attention, but of her, of her ability to be the sort of outward-facing person he secretly and desperately wanted to be—sank into the bog that filled his head.

  Instead, he said, “What are you going to do when Ray gets tired of fucking you?”

  She got up from the couch without another word. He heard her bedroom door slam a few seconds later.

  Their father came home soon after that. He’d bought two rotisserie chickens at the grocery store, but Amelia didn’t want any dinner, and neither did Simon, so Michael ate in the kitchen alone. At eight thirty, Amelia went out. Simon was still sitting in the den, and he couldn’t hear much of what she said to their father before she left. She didn’t look into the den on her way out.

  A few minutes later, Michael appeared in the doorway. He asked Simon if he was staying in. Simon nodded. His father nodded back. The surf movie had ended, the TV screen cut to black.

  “Can I turn on the lights or are you sitting in the dark for a reason?” Michael asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  His father nodded again. He waited a few moments. Then he said, “What’s your sister so angry about?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Ray?”

  “Did they have a fight?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “She doesn’t like to talk about that kind of thing with me.”

  “Have you tried?”

  Michael let out an irritated puff of breath. “Don’t be snotty.”

  His father went into his bedroom a little after ten o’clock. Simon walked upstairs with the idea that he would go to bed early himself, but he found he wasn’t even close to being able to sleep. He felt terrible about what he’d said to Amelia, but part of him—the stubborn, aggrieved part, the part forever underappreciated and wronged—clung to a sense of its own sour righteousness. He slipped down the hall to Amelia’s bedroom. The door was unlocked. He shut it quietly behind him and stood very still as he looked around.

  He noticed a strange smell he couldn’t identify until he spotted the incense holder and its worm of crumbled ash on the windowsill. The closet door was open, disgorging piles of dirty clothes. The desk was covered with textbooks, colored pencils, loose papers. He searched the room for traces of Kippler, as though Ray might have marked his territory by pissing on the carpet. He went through the drawers in her desk, and right there, in the top drawer, was a small plastic bag of about a dozen white pills. Also in the drawer was a smooth, rounded black stone, shaped like a swollen thumb, and a vanity mirror, both coated with white powder residue. He wanted to feel what Amelia felt; he wanted to understand from the inside what she’d been doing these last weeks. He put one of the pills on the desk and ground it with the stone until it dissolved into dust, which then stuck to the stone and the surface of the desk and was impossible to scrape into anything resembling a line. He brushed the dust into the wastebasket, and then he tried again, this time placing the pill between two sheets of paper. This method worked better, and he carefully tilted the paper and spilled the pile of powder onto the mirror. He divided the pile into two lines with Amelia’s school ID and used a short length of straw he’d found in the drawer to suck one of them up his nose.

  Simon had never snorted anything before, and the burn was vicious. He wasn’t prepared for it. He reeled back onto the bed and sat on its edge, stunned. How did they do this? He stood up and quickly snorted the other line before he had any second thoughts. He tried to clean the stone and mirror even though his hands were shaking. He hurried back into his own bedroom. He sat down on the bed, then stood by the window, then paced back and forth across the floor. His mind accelerated, each thought tumbling out ahead of the next, but it was a linear sort of acceleration, nothing like being stoned, none of that awful sense of losing ownership of his thoughts. Instead, he was painfully in control, moving from thought to thought very, very quickly. He felt as though the top of his skull had been removed and a cool, mentholated breeze was caressing the exposed crenulations of his brain. Delivered by this speed and this focus was a clear imperative: he needed to apologize to Amelia, and he needed to do it right now. Waiting for her to come home would be disastrous. He latched on to the notion that if he didn’t find her and tell her he was sorry and beg her to forgive him, something horrible might happen to her—that she would bring this horrible thing, whatever it was, upon herself intentionally to show Simon what a shit he’d been.

  He didn’t want his father to know he’d gone out, so he got down on his hands and knees in the hallway and put his ear to the floor. He didn’t hear anything, not even the murmur of the radio Michael sometimes listened to while in bed. He closed the door to his room, leaving the light on, and slunk down the stairs, across the darkened foyer, and out the front door. He moved away from the house as quickly and quietly as he could, heading toward the beach. The drizzle had stopped, but every surface was covered with a glaze of moisture.

  At the head of Beach 113th, he climbed the stairs to the boardwalk. A cold wind blew in from the ocean, and the moisture was starting to ice up. His heart jackhammered away; his mouth was dry as paper. Of course, he had no idea where Amelia and Ray had gone. He decided to look around the cluster of stores and restaurants on Beach 116th, near the subway. The streets were deserted. The pizza place was empty; so was the kebab shop. Everything else except for Derry Hills was closed. He pressed his face to the bar’s window, the glass fogged up from cigarette smoke and the heat of the bodies within. Maybe Ray and Amelia had somehow managed to talk their way inside. He could see a crush of people against the bar, bellowing at each other under green tinsel and cardboard shamrocks left over from Saint Patrick’s Day, and beyond to the booths and scarred wooden tables. Ray and Amelia weren’t inside, and there was nowhere else to look. He thought they might be at one of Ray’s friends’ houses, but he didn’t know where any of those kids lived. He walked back along the boardwalk, to the head of Beach 113th. It was after eleven. His nerves were thrashed, ragged. He leaned against the railing facing the beach, its metal encased within a sheat
h of ice. The night was overcast and he couldn’t see the ocean very well. All he could make out were flashes of whitewater surging up out of the blackness and then expiring again just as quickly. From the wind and the sound, though, he could tell the waves were rough in a chaotic way, full of crossed-up whitecaps and currents.

  The reasonable thing would have been to go home and wait for Amelia there, but the thought of sneaking into the house, of creeping around like a burglar, of sitting on the edge of his bed, straining to hear the click of the front door, made his skin feel tight and pinched. He decided, instead, to wait for her outside, on the boardwalk, where he could see a good distance both east and west, as well as north across Rockaway Beach Boulevard and down the barrel of Beach 113th to their house.

  He didn’t have to wait long. He saw them coming, far off down the boardwalk, from the west, Neponsit or Belle Harbor. They were riding Kippler’s BMX, Amelia standing on the back pegs. He knew it was them from the cherry-red of the bike as it passed under the streetlights, and also from Amelia’s laugh, which he heard in snatches, chopped up and scattered by the wind. Kippler struggled to keep the bike upright on the icy wood, and they pitched and wobbled as they approached. Simon’s plan, if he could call it that, had been to peel Amelia away from whomever he found her with and speak to her alone. Clearly there was no way to do that now, yet he still didn’t want to go back to the house. He only had about thirty seconds before they would see him. Without really thinking about what he was doing, he hurried down the stairs to the beach and hid in the space under the boardwalk, crouching against one of the cement supports.

  The roar of the ocean echoed in the hollow as though he were wedged inside a giant conch shell. The distance from the sand to the boards above his head was about six feet, and the space extended back into darkness maybe a dozen feet before the level of sand rose to meet the boards and pinch it shut. Some light from the streetlamps slipped through the gaps between the boards. Submerged in the damp sand were crumpled beer cans, unidentifiable mounds of plastic. Freezing water dripped onto his head and inside the collar of his jacket.

  He heard Amelia’s laugh again—unchecked, goofy, the way he remembered it from when they were younger. The boards rippled above his head. He heard a rattle and thump as the bike tipped over and they spilled off, Amelia laughing louder now. There was a pause, and then the boards rippled again as they walked toward the stairs that led down to the beach. He pulled himself farther back into the shadows and waited for them to appear at the foot of the stairs. Kippler had his arm around Amelia, and they stumbled as they hit the lumpy sand. Their footsteps crunched on the crust of ice until they stopped to sit on the ridge of some frozen tire tracks about twenty feet in front of him. He stared at Amelia’s back, at her hunched and narrow shoulders. They lit cigarettes, the smoke drifting back to his hiding place under the boards. Amelia took a swig off a small bottle Kippler removed from his pocket, coughing before handing it back. Simon’s fingers started to turn numb; the muscles in his legs cramped. They sat for a while, smoking and talking, sometimes kissing. He wanted to know what they were talking about, whether Amelia was telling Kippler what her brother had said to her earlier that night. He inched up to the edge of the shadows and leaned forward, which was exactly when Amelia turned around to flick the butt of her cigarette over her shoulder.

  She saw him. He knew she had. She paused for a second, her arm bent, the butt glowing between her fingers, her head turned precisely toward where he was hiding. Then she tossed the filter away and turned back to the ocean, and to Kippler.

  Simon stayed where he was, frozen in place. They stood up and started to walk back to the stairs. He shrunk himself down, pressing his body into the sand. As they went up the stairs, he heard Kippler say he’d walk her to her house. She told him it was fine, that he should just ride home along the boardwalk; she said her brother might be waiting up for her and that it would be better if she showed up alone. Simon guessed then that she’d told Kippler what he’d said, and he was filled with a bottomless shame.

  The tires of Kippler’s BMX rolled over his head and off down the boardwalk. After a minute or two, he heard footsteps coming down the stairs. He stepped out of the hollow and met Amelia on the sand.

  She stared at him. “What are you doing, Simon?” Her voice was defeated, dead.

  “I want to apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “For what I said earlier.”

  “Which time?”

  “In the den,” he said, “earlier tonight.”

  She nodded. “So you had to stalk me to tell me you were sorry. That makes sense.”

  He told her he’d had a feeling something terrible was going to happen to her if he didn’t find her and apologize.

  She nodded again. “Something terrible like kissing Ray or smoking a cigarette or having a drink? Something terrible like that?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “No?” she said. “Then why don’t you tell me what you did mean.”

  He looked down at his sneakers. He knew anything he said would sound absurd. Thoughts and feelings that had seemed natural and defensible to him would be, by the act of being hammered into words and spoken, rendered grotesque. So he swallowed, tasting the acrid drip of the crushed Ritalin, and said nothing. Amelia sneered and marched past him toward the waterline. He hurried after her, calling for her to wait. She spun around. “What do you want from me?” she hissed. Now her voice was alive, crackling with anger.

  “I want . . .” He trailed off and stood there, staring at her, at her face screwed up into an expression of total contempt. The purity of her anger hit him like a slap across the face.

  “You can’t say it?” she said. “Fine. I’ll tell you what you want. You want me to be a weak little twelve-year-old girl with migraines again. You want me to be helpless. You want me to need your protection, so you can feel like you have a purpose. Well, listen to me now: you can’t have that anymore.”

  She walked away from him, toward the water. He followed her, his sneakers crunching across crab and mussel shells snarled in seaweed. Amelia stopped at the foot of the groyne. It jutted out about forty-five feet into the water, a narrow strip of concrete hemmed in on both sides by piles of uneven rocks fixed to each other with grout. She climbed up onto the concrete strip. She looked down at him imperiously from her perch on the rocks and asked if he had anything to say.

  “I’ve only done any of this because I love you,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Possessiveness isn’t love.”

  She started walking out along the concrete strip, her arms spread wide, placing one foot directly in front of the other, heel to toe, as though she were balancing on a tightrope. Patches of slick ice dotted the concrete. She walked out ten feet and then was surrounded by water on both sides. Waves slapped against the rocks, spray blowing over the top.

  “Get down from there,” he said, knowing it was the exact wrong thing to say and unable to stop himself from saying it. “Get down, Amelia, please.”

  She laughed and continued her walk out to the tip. He scrambled up onto the concrete. She turned around and saw him. She lifted one leg off the ground and bent it behind her like a stork.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “Now the wind’s going to blow me right off.”

  “Stop it.” He approached her slowly, his sneakers slipping on the ice. A strong gust of wind really did blow then, whipping her hair across her face. She put her foot back down, but still she stood there, defiant.

  He should have backed away. He should have backed away and stepped off the groyne and let her know that she wasn’t being told to do anything. Instead, he stepped toward her. He stepped toward her, and he offered her his hand. The taunting smile disappeared from her face. “Get away from me,” she said. She took a few steps backward.

  “Amelia, please.”

  She shook her head. “Ge
t away. I’ll come down when I want to.”

  He took another step toward her. She stepped back quickly, her heel slipping on a patch of ice. She stumbled and one of her feet missed the concrete strip, plunging into a space between two of the stones. Her leg buckled, her ankle trapped at a peculiar angle, and as she tried to wrench herself free, Simon heard a pop, a dry cracking noise, like a twig snapping under a heavy boot. She cried out and reached for her ankle—an involuntary motion, a reflex—and the momentum of her reaching pitched her forward onto the rocks. Her foot popped free, but she wasn’t able to find any grip on the icy stones and she slid into the water.

  He rushed to the edge of the concrete and looked down. She was there, at the base of the groyne, five feet below him, hanging on to rocks slick with algae, barely holding her head above the waves. He’d been surfing in his thick winter wetsuit just a few days before; he knew how cold the water was. He knew water that cold feels like lead. It squeezes the air out of your lungs. It doesn’t want you living in it. One of Amelia’s hands slipped off the rocks, and her head went under. Somehow she pulled herself back up long enough to scream his name. But still he didn’t move to help her. He was frozen. Panic seized his muscles, paralyzing him. All of this took about five seconds. Then a wave slammed into the groyne, and she was pulled away from the rocks and sucked under. Her head reappeared a few yards away, a shiny blot against the dark water. Finally he scrambled down the rocks and dove in.

  The cold was like an iron bar slamming into his head. His jacket filled with water and he struggled free of it, trying to keep Amelia’s bobbing head in sight. A line of whitewater rushed over him, and when he surfaced again, he didn’t see her. He swam as hard as he could, his heavy clothes pulling him down. The water was pitch-black. He felt the rip running alongside the groyne pull him away from the beach. He screamed her name, and a blast of spray filled his mouth. Lifted by a swell, he saw the flash of her hair out near the tip of the groyne. The rip ran along the flank of the groyne, then bent around the end into deeper water. That was where she was being taken. He thrashed his way out, trying to stay near the rocks without being smashed into them. He tried to keep his eyes on her head, but he kept losing her in the chop. He finally reached the tip of the groyne and grabbed on to one of the outermost rocks. He braced against the current, raised himself up onto the rock. The ocean stretched out in front of him, black and cold and empty. He was shadowed from the lights of the boardwalk; the darkness was total. He screamed her name. Nothing. His body was shaking violently. His vision kept contracting and expanding, as though his pupils were beating with his heart. He held on to the rock, his hands numb and bloody. He screamed until his throat was raw. His grip started to loosen as a warmth began to spread through his limbs. He was still aware enough to recognize this as the beginnings of hypothermia. He stopped screaming. He felt sleepy, distracted. He used the last of his concentration and strength to haul himself up over the rocks and onto the concrete. He lay there, his cheek pressed against a patch of ice. He recognized that the ice was cold, that he should move, but these facts didn’t seem to directly concern him.