“Am not. The water’s just looking nice today.”
“Gogo has to go see he baby boy and take the shit from he lady,” Edwin says with a gleam in his eye.
“You have a kid?” she says. She’s been hanging out with them for days and this is the first she’s heard of any baby. The information tickles her. In her head, she tells Nika, Then Clive had to go take care of his son, as if it doesn’t ruffle her at all.
Clive’s face has gone blank. Maybe he doesn’t care about the kid. Or maybe he does care about him and he’s ashamed to be standing here getting stoned with Edwin and some girl while his child waits for him and he doesn’t want to think about it.
“He’ll make three soon,” he says softly.
“Wait. Are you married?”
Clive shakes his head.
“Relax, Goges.” Edwin claps a hand on his friend’s big shoulder. “If Sara never consents to marry you, more time to lime with me.”
Clive nods, his face empty. She can hardly bear it, and at the same time cannot look away from it, his gentle, pained way of being in the world; he reminds her, in a way, of Claire.
She touches his arm. “She don’t know what she’s missing.”
“She don’t know what she’s missing. You’re turning into a proper island girl, now,” Edwin says.
* * *
EVERY NIGHT, after her sister is asleep, she crosses the dark resort grounds and meets them in the parking lot and they drive to Paulette’s Place, where they drink and smoke and she and Edwin dance while Clive stands near them on the dance floor, bouncing his large body not quite to the beat. At times it seems clear to her what Edwin wants—he flirts, manufactures opportunities to touch her. One night, his crotch grazes her hip as they dance and she feels that he is hard. Her skin turns to gooseflesh. His erection scares her. Well, Drew’s scared her, too, at first, didn’t it? Connecticut’s hand on her thigh scared her. But she knows it is not the same.
Suddenly she sees John the gardener’s face—his soft lamb’s-wool hair, his dark skin. Is that all this is, what she’s doing with Edwin? An attempt to absolve her frightened child self? And she still can’t do it. She feels him against her and she tenses.
But nothing comes of it. When the song ends, he buys her another round at the bar, complimenting Paulette on her dress while they wait. He is loose and jovial again, as if their pressed-together dancing didn’t happen. She is starting to see something new about him, a controlled aspect simmering just beneath his charming surface. The moves he makes—letting her feel his hardness, then striking up a conversation with Paulette when she fully expected him to lead her off to some dark corner—seem, beneath the offhandedness with which he executes them, studied, like there is nothing he says or does that he hasn’t thought through. Maybe this will go where she thinks it’s going. Or maybe nothing will happen. When she considers this possibility she is humiliated but also, in some way, relieved.
* * *
ON A rainy day, after picking up a puka shell necklace for Claire at the gift shop, Alison finds Edwin taking his break behind the restaurant. “No beach today?” she asks.
“Can’t.” He points out at the black rocks. Waves crash against them, sending spray high into the air and blocking the path to his usual spot.
“We could swim there,” Alison says.
“You crazy? Look at that water.”
“Bet you two joints I can do it. Around the rocks, to the beach, and back.”
“I’m not betting your death sentence, miss,” he says with a laugh.
“Suit yourself.” She walks down to the water. She peels off her tank top and shimmies out of her shorts, revealing the new bikini she got for this trip, blue with white flowers.
“What are you doing?”
She dives in. The waves are swollen, but it isn’t as bad as it looks from shore; besides, she’s a strong swimmer. She strokes through the waves, keeping her head when she sees them rise up above her. When she is out past the rocks she begins to arc around. She swims until her limbs are stiff with exhaustion and every part of her tastes salt. She loves this feeling, the rush of hanging off the edge of your comfort zone but still knowing you have a solid grip on it. When she returns to shore she hands Edwin a shard of green sea glass.
“Proof,” she gasps, breathing hard but trying not to show it.
That afternoon in the parking lot, he gives her the two joints she has won. “I think I’ve been underestimating you,” he says.
“Is that right?”
He nods. “You’re a dangerous girl.”
* * *
ON THE last night of vacation, she can’t help herself. She goes looking for Connecticut. She finds him by the bar in the lobby. He wears khaki slacks and a blue-and-white-checked shirt. He is freshly showered. His blond hair still holds narrow ridges from the tines of a comb.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
She reaches into the pocket of her jean skirt. “Want to?” she says, revealing the joint in her palm. Easiest thing in the world. Connecticut grabs one of the Indigo Bay matchbooks from the glass bowl on the bar. She leads him to the parking lot. She puts the joint to her lips. He strikes the match. When she exhales, she coughs.
“You okay?” he asks, a hand to her back, a show of rather than actual concern—he is a good guy and wants her to know it. It’s nice, though, his hand there.
She nods and passes the joint to him.
“How’d you manage to get this?”
“Let’s just say I have my ways.”
He leans closer, whispers in her ear, “I like your ways.” He kisses her neck. Her body shivers, but she shakes the pleasure away. When they have finished the joint, she drops the roach on the ground.
“You’re really not going to tell me where you got it?”
“Well…,” she says.
“So secretive, Alison.” He twists a strand of her hair around his finger.
“It’s no big deal, really. Edwin gave it to me.” She says it like it is the least interesting fact in the world.
“Oh,” he says, stiffening. “Well, lucky us. We’ll have to thank him.” He pulls her hair away from the back of her neck and kisses her again.
“I have to go,” she says. She pecks him, quick and delicate, on the lips.
“Come on, why don’t you—”
“Shhh,” she says. She is the star in a script she knows by heart. “Later. I’ll find you.”
She begins to walk away, but he holds on to her hand.
“Where?” he asks.
She smiles coyly. “I promise.”
* * *
DOES ALISON seem awful to you? I admit that, as I channel my sister, I sometimes have an urge to shake her. I find her incessant judginess toward our parents and her fellow resort guests self-righteous and bratty, especially the judgments she renders on the blond boy, who is practically her double: bright, privileged, attractive, and tasteful enough to know to be self-deprecating about such things. Equally frustrating is the way she exempts Edwin and Clive from her judgment. How desperate she is for their approval, their special attentions, how badly she needs them to know that she is more than, better than, all the basically decent people from her world.
What I can’t figure out: Was Alison insufferable in a perfectly ordinary teenage way, or was something darker at play? Was her behavior typical or troubling? What destiny lay ahead of her as she toyed with the blond boy and danced at Paulette’s Place and swam out beyond the black rocks in the rain-swelled surf? Who was she?
* * *
AS THE eggplant-colored Vauxhall Astra (how she loves that name!) rumbles down Mayfair Road, she sees her last night on Saint X spread above her like a sky dense with stars. She feels the night’s promise in the itch of the upholstery against the backs of her thighs and in “Boombastic” blasting from the radio. She wears a turquoise halter top and a short jean skirt; she is an island girl, flying away from Connecticut at the speed of light. I think I’ll stay in tonight. Ho
nestly, Nika? These campus parties just feel very tame to me lately.
It is hot inside Paulette’s Place. Sweat gleams on skin. “Buy me a drink,” she tells them. She takes a shot of rum, then another, and struts onto the dance floor. She sways her hips and presses up against Edwin, then spins away to uncertain Clive, back and forth. Irresistible. She sees herself from outside herself, from somewhere up in the mantle of stars, like the story of her life is already burned in light and she has only to navigate by it to make herself into herself.
Once Clive is a few drinks in he is not so hesitant. When she dances with him, he holds her hips.
“Check you out, Goges!” Edwin hoots.
Clive grins.
She winks at Edwin and moves in closer to Clive.
His hands, so clumsy and searching, stir something in her. As they dance, his eyes wander from her breasts to the floor to Edwin to the ceiling, never settling anywhere, as if looking at any one thing too long is just asking for punishment. An image comes to her, a baby boy with damp black curls and eyelashes to the horizon.
It’s then she understands. It isn’t only Edwin she wants. It is the two of them together, the power of two men so different from each other, and all eyes on her. They will dance a few minutes longer, and then she will say, “Let’s get out of here.” They will go to some deserted beach, or they will sneak into an unoccupied hotel room at Indigo Bay, or maybe they will only make it out behind Paulette’s, to the scruffy patch of sand and grass at the edge of the parking lot, hidden from view by an old junked van. Things with Edwin will reach their natural conclusion. Even as she does it, she will be telling Nika, It was pretty good. Not, like, earth-shattering or anything.
Then she will turn her attention to Clive. She will push onto her tiptoes and kiss him on the mouth. He will surprise her. She will expect him to be timid and awkward, but he won’t be. He will hold the back of her head and kiss her hard, so that the whole weight of him is contained in his kiss. He will take her ponytail and squeeze it in his fist like a rag. He will take her hand and thrust it down his pants. The more afraid she feels, the more she will want it.
He will lay her down on the ground. The stars will wheel overhead, fine and white, and in them she will see herself, years from now, looking back at her as she is in this moment, beautiful and reckless as a young woman ought to be. She will have this night forever. She will carry it like her scar, a thing she can always feel, even when she isn’t touching it. He will move over her like she isn’t precious at all, like he is barely aware of her beneath him. She will feel so small in his arms, and she will like this so much it will suck the air out of her—the way she disappears, the way she becomes nothing at all. She will finally feel like she is in this place without herself, and maybe that is all she ever wanted, for her little life to vanish right out from under her.
She will stare into the sky. The stars will rush at her across time and space like spears. They will slash her up with their cold white light.
I didn’t have sex for almost a year after she died. At first I didn’t want to. Next to Alison, the girls at college were so mind-numbing. I’d go to parties and they’d be wearing all this makeup and this perfume or fruity shampoo or whatever makes them smell like that, and while they were talking to me they would pose and giggle like it was an audition, and it made me feel dead.
Later I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I’d go back to a girl’s dorm room and she’d light a vanilla candle or something, and all of a sudden I just had to get out of there. The girl would be embarrassed and hurt and insulted. She’d say, “Did I do something wrong, Drew?” I’d pull on my pants real quick and bolt. I’d go back to my apartment, which was a real shithole I shared with these guys I’d ended up living with, and drink beer and play Mario Kart until four A.M. I haven’t kept up with any of those guys. I can’t. I thought Alison was the love of my life and she was dead and that was it for me.
But things changed. Alison changed. With time, she stopped being this guilty conscience or this barrier or whatever she was. She became a way of … opening up, I guess. I told Shannon about her after two months, in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. I told Anjali after only two weeks, when we snuck away from a friend’s housewarming party. I’d tell the girls about Alison and they’d tell me about their mother’s drinking, or their brother’s depression, or being bullied.
I told Hayley after three months, on a road trip to her cousin’s wedding in Cleveland. After I told her, she stroked my arm and said, “You poor thing.” I drank too much at her cousin’s dumb wedding. I got loud and obnoxious with her blowhard father. I spent the rest of the night puking into the toilet at the Best Western. Hayley stayed awake all night taking care of me and the next morning she sucked apologies from me and I gave them to her, tail between my legs. I did behave badly. It would take a few more months for me to admit to myself that I hated her; I’d hated her from the moment she stroked my arm in the car like that.
With Rachel, I waited almost a year. I didn’t want her to feel like she had to compete with my murdered high school sweetheart. When we got married, Alison changed again. She became a past I was ready to leave behind. A ghost I no longer invited inside. We’re divorced now, but that was about other things. She wanted kids, I thought I did but changed my mind. “But don’t you want to see who we’d make?” she’d say, like she thought it could only end well.
Sometimes I can’t help it. Alison forces her way back in and I start litigating the whole thing all over again. She had a temper, no doubt about it. I think about how riled up she could get about things that were, I don’t know, just the world being the world. Like when Nick cheated on Becca and Alison slapped him. Or that teacher, I forget his name, but he had this policy where if you were late he shut the door, and if there was a test, tough luck, you failed, and once this kid Paul, this poor fucking fat kid everybody gave a hard time, I think he was probably gay, too, and this was before you could be, he showed up late on test day and this teacher wouldn’t let him in, and she went off on him. The star student challenging the teacher in front of the whole class. The rest of us sat there slack-jawed. She thought everything was her business, I guess is what I’m saying. I’ll think about that and wonder if maybe it got her into trouble. Maybe she stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.
But I don’t spend nearly as much time thinking about this stuff as I used to. Alison’s death is a mystery like God or Stonehenge or intelligent life in the universe—if you aren’t careful, that shit will consume you, and in the end you’ll still be no closer to solving it. I’m thirty-seven years old, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that you can live a pretty decent life without unpacking life’s mysteries.
SARA
IN HIS YEARS DRIVING A TAXI, Clive has observed that there are two kinds of passengers. First, there are those who ignore him. They spend the ride as if they are alone. They may make telephone calls about sensitive matters. A few times he has heard about the merger between two large corporations, or the resignation of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, before the news appears in the papers; I could have been a wealthy man ten times over with all the insider knowledge I’ve overheard, if I had any money to invest to begin with, hahaha—he’s heard this joke a few times around the garage. In his presence customers have called divorce attorneys (“I want him fucked, do you understand me? I want him fucked so hard his head spins.”) and parents with dementia (“Mommy, I need you to listen to Nurse Jen, okay? Can you do that for me, Mommy?”). They may belch or pick their noses in the backseat, and they will not be surreptitious about it, for to these customers, the taxi is that rarest thing: a private enclave in the midst of the city. In his backseat he has seen grown men sob. A teenage girl hold up a small mirror to pop her zits and scowl hatefully at her reflection. A father slap a son across the face.
Then there are those who talk to him, seeking, he supposes, the wisdom that films and television shows have taught them to expect from taxi drivers. These passengers unburden them
selves to him of their darkest shames. Affairs, addictions, a stepdaughter’s birthday forgotten. To these passengers, the taxi driver is priest, the rider penitent.
Ultimately, though, these types are not as different as they seem. Both those who ignore him and those who entrust him with their most precious secrets do so because, in the end, he is no one to them.
It used to be that when he came home after his shift he could leave these people behind, but the neighborhood is changing. Last year, a white family moved into his building, a couple with a green-eyed, black-haired little girl, Maeve. It won’t be long before somebody opens a wine bar nearby. Before too long, one of those food halls might open in Flatbush, and maybe the Little Sweet will have a stall there. The white family in the building are polite and very friendly and at first it seemed there were some advantages to their arrival. When the boiler broke last winter, it was fixed within forty-eight hours. The white family, it turned out, had called 311 about it. He’d overheard them chatting with a neighbor in the vestibule, the neighbor explaining that in the past they’d gone as long as two weeks without heat, the white couple expressing outrage at the landlord’s tenant treatment. But now his roommate Cecil calls the family the 311s, because they have also called on more than one occasion to lodge noise complaints, leading to police visits. “Why can’t they just knock on a door?” Cecil grumbles, though he must know the answer to this question, as Clive does. They are afraid. Not afraid that their black, foreign neighbors pose a threat to their safety, but afraid that a confrontation will mean losing the approval they feel they’ve earned with their “Good morning”s and their “Let me get that for you”s. He remembers something Edwin used to say: Nice is some real fuckery.
So he knows what this girl, Emily, is doing at the Little Sweet. After all, she’s not the only white kid who’s become a regular recently. There is also the man with the sketch pad. (What is he drawing? Clive wonders. Scenes of locals in their natural habitat?) It’s not enough for them to live here, to overrun every last space—they need everyone else to be happy about it, too. Every time he catches himself enjoying her company, he reminds himself that’s what he is to her. Her local friend. Her badge of approval.
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