by Sara Shepard
Her whole body trembled. “She’s in God’s hands now.”
Something indescribable passed over my father’s face. “I’m sure.”
When the seven soldiers ascended the hill, Steven’s posture changed. They were dressed in blue suits and carried rifles over their shoulders. They all had hair and expressions exactly like Steven. I wondered where they’d come from—they didn’t seem particularly Cobaltian. More likely the funeral director had them bused in from a more official town nearby.
They reached us and fanned out in a line. The silence was absolute. Stella shook her head. Spent every penny, I bet she was thinking. My brother was rapt, watching as the head soldier or whatever barked out an order and a few of them gathered the flag off my grandmother’s coffin and started to fold it up. They folded and folded and folded until it was a compact triangle. Stella balled her fists and kept her eyes on the ground.
The soldiers handed the flag to my father. He took it, befuddled, and finally tucked it under his arm. Then the soldiers lined up again and started shooting. The noise of seven guns shooting all at once was ridiculously loud.
The funeral director hit a lever that lowered the coffin down into the ground, and everyone threw dirt on top of it. Stella tossed in a couple of lottery tickets. One of the biddies dropped a picture of Jesus. My brother threw a yellow ribbon. I threw nothing, and neither did my father. Samantha leaned down and dropped a picture of Frank Sinatra, one in which his eyes were tinted to look extra blue and his skin was all smooth and velvety. At that, Stella began to cry, big, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. Samantha put her hand on her back and walked Stella over to a tree. “It’s all right,” she murmured.
We paraded back down the hill to the car. There would be old biddies coming over to my grandmother’s house for an after-funeral party, if you could call it that, and there would be cabbage rolls and various other things cooked in a Crock-Pot. Tomorrow morning we’d go back to Brooklyn and resume our normal lives of ignoring each other.
“So this is Cobalt,” my father said, sweeping his arm around. He sounded disappointed—maybe because we obviously didn’t love it. I walked a little closer to my father. He looked the same as he did before my mother vanished: his face was clean-shaven, his shoulders strong, his legs muscular from—years ago, now—cycling in Prospect Park. If he passed my mother on the street, she would still easily recognize him, but would he recognize her? What if she had really changed?
My father stopped in front of a tombstone. He made a small choking sound and stepped back. I looked down. The grave marker said Kay Mulvaney, 1953–1970.
“That’s your friend’s girlfriend, isn’t it?” I whispered.
He nodded. The wind pushed up against our backs. My father crouched down and put his ear to the grass and whispered something I couldn’t hear. In a few seconds he stood back up and brushed the grass and dry dirt off his suit. “Come on,” he said to me.
I couldn’t rightly determine his expression. He started walking toward the others, but I stayed where I was.
“Dad?” I called quietly, my heart pounding. He stopped. “Why did you say you were separated?”
He stood very still.
“To that funeral director guy. He asked if you were married, and you said you were separated. Is that what’s going on?”
He lowered his arms to his side and walked back to me. I watched a hawk circle twice around the graves before he responded. “What was I supposed to tell him, Summer? The truth?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s like when someone says, ‘How are you?’ Do you say, ‘Well, my head hurts and I’m lonely and depressed and I’m worried about everything and the world is collapsing and full of evil’? Or do you say, ‘I’m fine’?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You usually go for the longer version.”
He paused. “I suppose I do, yes.”
“You could’ve just said pickle.”
“What?”
I closed my eyes, aching again. The memory of the time I’d spent with Philip was slipping further and further away with every passing minute. “Nothing.”
The rain finally stopped. Our feet sank into the wet, loamy grass. We passed a whole section for the Elkerson family. I tilted my head to the sky, expecting to see the thick black smoke from the soldiers’ rifles. Instead, I saw a rainbow.
“I got a letter from her,” my father said quietly. “Two weeks ago.”
I gaped at him.
“It said…it said she was all right. She asked about you.”
“Where does she live? What is she doing? Are you going to respond?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He picked at a loose thread on his jacket. “She mentioned a divorce, though. Said she could make it very easy. It’s probably the best thing.”
“Did she tell you where she lives? Did she give you a return address?”
He kicked at the grass. “Long Island. East Hampton. Do you know where that is?”
“The beach, right?”
He nodded. “But it was only a post office box. It doesn’t mean anything. She could have things forwarded from there.”
“Did you tell Steven?”
“No. But I’m going to. When all this is done.”
A hot, bitter taste rose to the back of my throat. “Dad, I’m sorry.”
He looked at me curiously. “What are you sorry for?”
I thought of the spiny, crackling snaps under my skin the day I yelled at him and slammed my bedroom door. How his face had crumpled, how he’d looked so devastated. I shook my head, afraid to say more.
After the snow globe incident, when my father was in the psych ward, he wore a nightgown that stopped at his knees, and then, later, pale green hospital scrub pants. He said his roommate smacked his lips in his sleep. In the ward’s lobby was a bulletin board with construction-paper balloons pinned to it. Someone had printed each patient’s name in the middle of each balloon. I didn’t cry when I saw my dad’s hospital bracelet, or the curled-up, mumbling woman in the corner, or the jagged scar on my father’s palm. I didn’t cry when I asked him what it felt like, suffering with whatever had befallen him, and he replied, “It’s something that’s been inside me for a long time. And you fight and fight and fight against it for so long, but then it just crashes over you and pulls you down.” But when I saw his name written in one of those construction-paper balloons, Richard, optimistically, innocently, I had to turn away from him, duck my head to the water fountain as if I desperately needed a drink.
We sat in the common room and he pulled a hand-drawn card from the scrub pants’ small back pocket. “Here,” he said. It was a gelatinous map of the world; he’d penciled in each individual country, body of water, mountain range, and even added some fish in the oceans and birds in the sky—birds, come to think of it, that looked a lot like the drawings on the graves in Philip’s backyard. Everything on the map was right: France was next to Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. Japan was to the right of Korea. He even got all of the newly independent Soviet Union countries in the right places, Belarus and Estonia and Uzbekistan. Somewhat arbitrarily, he’d drawn a stick person over Spain, and another over Australia. There was a line between the two of them, linking them together. Inside, the card said, Me and You.
We walked now in silence, catching up with the others. “Hey,” my father said, stopping short halfway down the cemetery’s wildflower-strewn hill. “You know what’s over there?” He pointed to a house.
“What?” I asked.
“Old man Cross’s trampoline.” He shaded his eyes. “I wonder if it’s still there.”
“It is,” Pete answered. “I drove by before you got here the other day.”
They exchanged a glance. “You want to go?” my dad asked.
“Sure,” Pete said.
“Summer? Steven?” My father looked at us. Suddenly he could have been eighteen, the age when he left Cobalt for good. Pete giggled beside him.
“Nah,” Steve
n said quickly.
“I’ll go,” I offered.
“Of course you will,” my father said, and took my hand.
Let me start off by saying that it’s all right that you haven’t been in touch. I understand how busy your life must be, what with your new job—your sister told me a little about it. For what it’s worth, I’m extremely proud.
And I get, too, how life can snow you under so quickly. Even here, I find myself so busy. There are so many activities they encourage us to try, like ceramics, book discussions, tai chi in the front lawn—a whole crowd goes to that, thinking it will work as well as antidepressants. Recently, I took my first tennis lesson. As it gets warmer, I’ll be able to practice more and more. There’s something very soothing about tennis, especially thwacking the ball against a brick wall all alone.
A lot of things here make me think of you. Not long into my stay, I noticed a starling with only one leg. He managed to get around all right, but it still looked so difficult and painful. I gave him my extra crusts of bread and coaxed him to hop up on my finger. The gray cat started coming around not long after, small and skinny and with a pus-filled eye. I tried to catch her, but cats aren’t like dogs—they’re slaves to no one. I snagged a can of tuna and an opener from the kitchen, opened it on the lawn, and hid behind the hedges. It took a while, but the cat finally slunk to the can and eagerly began to eat.
Not long after, there was a terrible storm, washing debris onto the walkways, knocking down branches, cutting off our power for a few hours in the middle of the night. I worried about my animals—had they found shelter? Were they cold? I worried so much, I started scratching the skin on my arms raw, and the staff had to settle me down. The following day, the animals were right back in their regular spots, hopping about, begging for food. It made me realize how much tougher animals are than humans. Kind of pathetic, really.
Since then, the people here have helped me understand why I do these kinds of things for animals, why the tug I feel inside is so powerful. I could have swerved, you see. There was time, a few, fat seconds, where I could have gripped the wheel and wrenched it to the right. I remember, all too painfully, the heaviness of the deer’s body, the deafening thunk of impact. I will never forget that moment, or the moments that came after.
Maybe it isn’t true—maybe there was no time to react. But since then, I’ve lived my life like there was. So I wanted to write you to tell you that I understand, I think, what you were going through a while back. The way you felt about the military, about the bombing. How you connected it to other things. I know what it feels like to watch something happen and wish, going forward, that you could do something, anything, to change at least your world, the people around you, to keep everything close to you safe. But you don’t have to live that way, as you’ve made no fatal mistakes. You’ve done nothing wrong. I hope you realize that.
And maybe you don’t feel that way anymore, anyway—your life seems so different, richer, at least from what Summer has said. I hope that’s the case. I hope that one day, my life will be different and richer, too, but from this vantage point, sitting here in this little room, it’s so hard to know.
iii
acting for beginners
brooklyn, june 1998
eleven
I sat in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. It was a new dentist in Lower Manhattan; I’d switched from my old one in Brooklyn when he moved his practice to New Jersey. The office walls were painted lavender, and there were the typical array of Life magazines on the coffee tables. A glossy poster across from me asked, What Are Molar Sealants? Another crowed, Let’s Talk Gingivitis! The ceiling fan rattled around, its cord swinging. When I came in, the receptionist announced that the air conditioner was broken. She was very defensive, as if someone had tried to blame her for not knowing how to fix air conditioners. The room felt thick and close. It was nearly a hundred degrees outside and only June.
The door to the back opened, and an assistant in a green smock looked around. “Summer Davis?”
A few fluffy, expectant seconds passed. I knew I should stand up, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why.
“Summer Davis?” the girl called again. She looked at her clipboard, then at the receptionist. “Is Summer here?”
The receptionist swiveled the phone receiver away from her mouth and surveyed the waiting room. “I could’ve sworn,” she said. I picked at a nonexistent stain on my jeans.
The assistant tugged at her scrub shirt. Down the hall, the dentist turned on the suction device. I heard a tube sucking up someone’s saliva. Then the drill.
“All right,” the assistant said, pausing to look at what must have been a roster behind the door. “How about Marion Campbell, then? Marion, are you here?”
And Marion, an older woman whose glasses hung on a hot-pink, charm-riddled chain, stood up gratefully. When the door closed behind them, I considered telling the receptionist that I was Summer Davis, and had been all along. Just to see the look on her face. Instead, I asked her for the key code to the bathroom, which was in the office building’s hall. She wrote it down on a Post-it and handed it to me wordlessly, her eyes shifting back and forth, as if it were something very dear and private.
In the bathroom, I pulled out the cell phone my father had bought for me for emergencies and called the dentist’s office. “This is Summer Davis,” I said, my voice sounding churchly and impressive in the echoing tiled room. I told the receptionist I was doing lab work and couldn’t make my cleaning. The receptionist’s voice, just a few walls away, sounded weary but unbothered. “How about Wednesday?” she said. I thought for a moment—my father’s procedure was tomorrow, Tuesday. It was almost impossible to think of something as mundane as a dentist’s appointment happening the day after that, but I told her to pencil me in anyway.
When I hung up, I stared at myself in the spotty mirror, trying to focus on both pupils at the same time. But that was the thing—I couldn’t do it. I had to concentrate on one pupil or the other. “This is Summer Davis,” I said to the mirror. But for one brief, beguiling second, it had been sort of nice not to be.
The Greenwich Diner kept its Christmas decorations up all year, so when I passed through the swinging front door, I was greeted by an animated Mrs. Claus standing on top of the hostess stand. Her white hair was in a bun, her delicate doll lips puckered into a smile, and she wore tiny wire-framed glasses. Her legs moved back and forth, making the velvet of her red pantsuit swish. Beneath that, I heard a small squeaking noise: the plastic of her inner thighs brushing together. I felt embarrassed for her.
Dr. Hughes hadn’t arrived yet, so I slid into the first open booth and took out my notebook. The pamphlet fell out, the one about the fellowship. Dr. Shea is known for his connections to genetic communities around the world, said a random snippet.
This was going to be the second time I’d met Dr. Hughes, my NYU biology advisor, at this diner. It was the middle of the day, past lunch, so there were only a few old ladies in a booth behind me, all slowly drinking milkshakes. More Mrs. Clauses gathered behind the counter, along with Santa and his elves and a toy train. Next to me were a bunch of dog-eared Time magazines, including one I remembered on the newsstands over a year ago—Timothy McVeigh in a white sweatshirt and orange prison pants, all ready for his sentencing for the Oklahoma City bombing. He leaned forward, staring at the camera calmly, as if to say, Why should I feel guilty for anything? Should He Die? the headline implored.
A waiter leaned down. “Coffee?”
I jumped. “Sure.”
“You startling my students again, Victor?” Dr. Hughes suddenly hovered over my table.
The waiter pulled her chair back and Dr. Hughes sat. We’d met when I was in her junior-level Principles of Genetics class five months ago. Upon entering college, I gravitated to biology, barely looking at the major requirements for English literature or art history. It was only natural that I studied genetics, as it had been the only thing that had held my interest for
years. The first few freshman-and sophomore-level biology classes were simple and basic, but once I got to Dr. Hughes’s level, things became complicated, full of diseases to memorize, case studies, new technical methods by which to isolate DNA, a lot of genotypes and markers and chemicals and a lot of problem sets. At this level, we were learning how to look for mutations in a gene, and that these mutations could lead to dire outcomes, impacting not only our general health, but also our behavior and psychological well-being.
I’d studied harder for her class than I ever studied for anything before, gobbling up the information. A few days after the first exam, Dr. Hughes had pulled me aside and told me she wanted to meet me here, at this diner. I had never said a word to her before that.
Dr. Hughes had stared at me when I walked down the diner’s aisle toward her. I was wearing a long skirt, and so was she. I thought perhaps she might be angry that we were dressed too similarly. When I reached her booth, she said, “You got every question on my exam correct.”
“Every single question?” I repeated.
“Yes. No one has done that before.”
Not the group of Russian boys who sat up front and answered everything? Not the overweight girl in the back who seemed to have the textbook memorized? Not the pale, fleshy boy named Dieter who wore the athletic-inspired T-shirt that said Watsoncrombie & Crick, Genetics Department? I was a little bit afraid of people in the genetics class—they took themselves so seriously.
“I’m sorry.” It was the only thing I could think to say.
“Don’t apologize.” She narrowed her small brown eyes. “But how did you get every question right?”
“I don’t know. I studied.”
Her mouth fell open. Apparently this was novel to her. I had paused, still not sure if I should sit down.
Now Dr. Hughes blotted her forehead with a napkin. “This humidity is killing me. I need to live somewhere dry. Arizona. Or maybe California.”