Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “What the fuck?” he says.

  I look over.

  He’s wiping his hand on his trousers. “Girl, quit slobbering!” he says.

  I laugh. “Edwin, man, she passed out!”

  He groans and shoves she away. In the starlight her scar glistens like a thing that could slither away. He lifts she arm and lets go. It flops.

  “Typical,” he spits.

  Edwin leaves her there and walks over to me. He lies down near me, right at the edge, so close he hangs one arm over it and swings it back and forth through the abyss above the sea. We look up at the stars. A memory comes over me like a breeze, of lying like this back in this same spot in secondary, when Keithley would take us out in the boat and sometimes, amid the bacchanal, the night would find its stillness. I’m drifting off now. Ground cool and smooth. Air cool and smooth. Sound of waves far below.

  Then I feel Edwin’s hand on my hand.

  He turns and looks at me. I don’t laugh or pull my hand away. It all happens fast. He unbuttons himself, then me. I make my mind go empty. I make myself all body. Not because I know what I want or don’t want, but because this night has taken us to a place we may never find again, and I need to be there with him before it’s gone. I don’t believe we’re doing this until he places my hand around him. He’s warm, like my own self. It’s he or me or we—I don’t bother to understand, just touch and rub, touch and rub, until the world goes tacky with we. We’re together beneath the cold stars, and then the stars groan and unleash their white light and the night goes so thick and sweet with our chlorine I swear that perfume will last until the stars are dead.

  Then I’m on the ground. Shoved off by he, hard, and at first I don’t know why, but then I sit up and rub my eyes open and see she looking at we.

  “The fuck you staring at, little girl?” Edwin says.

  Her eyes open wide. Her mouth makes an O and a sound comes out so small the wind takes it.

  She stands, gathers she sandals, and runs.

  FARAWAY

  “AT FIRST, I believed she would turn up.”

  People disappear and are found. A mother at a department store plunges into panic until she hears a muffled giggle coming from inside a rack of clothes. A husband is late on a rainy night, but eventually the headlights come up the driveway. The girl is sobering up somewhere. She is swimming in the ocean, in the pool. She is a bit late, is all, to the breakfast buffet. For a time, the missing person is everywhere. Then, sometimes, just as quickly, she is nowhere.

  Clive and I sat on the bench on the sidewalk. Snow had collected on our coats and on Clive’s gray wool hat. The traffic light at the end of the block bathed us in its shifting light—green, yellow, red. It was after midnight. I felt as if I had been walking for days, for years, and now that I had finally arrived at my destination, this faraway place the reaching of which had been my sole object for so long, I didn’t want to look around. I didn’t want to take in the sights or know anything about what kind of place this was. I was only tired.

  I said nothing and he continued. “When she ran off, I started to go after her, but Edwin said to let her go, and I did. We were only half a mile from Indigo Bay. We weren’t abandoning her in the middle of nowhere. I figured she’d find her way. On the drive home, we got pulled over and the police officer took us in to sleep it off. You must know about that, I guess. We were in a cell together all night, only the two of us, but we didn’t talk. We just sat there together. But it wasn’t a bad silence. It felt like we had time, is what I mean. We didn’t have to say anything to each other yet about what we’d done. Then the next day we found out she was missing and everything changed.”

  “What did you do?”

  “When he heard the news, Edwin came up to me on the beach and said, ‘Listen. We limed with she at Paulette’s and then we drove her back here. That’s all.’ So when the police questioned me that’s what I told them. I knew how it must look. The two of us with her all night, and now she happened to be gone? They knew I was hiding something, but what could I do, tell them what had happened?” He shook his head. “The police came and searched my grandmother’s house. They were looking for drugs. I don’t know how they knew. Edwin—he wouldn’t have done that to me. I still believe that. My grandmother watched me get taken away, with all the neighbors out in the street.” He ran his hand over his face.

  Clive told me the rest of his story, and I did my best to listen, though I confess I found it difficult to focus on the details of a life that I saw now had very little to do with me. He told me about his time in the eggshell-blue prison, where he and the twenty or so other incarcerated island men did nothing much as they waited out their sentences. At night, he was troubled by dreams. In them, he was back at the cliffs with Edwin, together beneath the stars. He looked up and saw everyone he knew standing in a circle around them, watching. We have found you, we know, everybody knows. He woke from these dreams soaked in sweat. Then he reminded himself that the girl was the only one who had seen them together, and she was dead. He felt so relieved, and right on the heels of this emotion came the next one—filthy, gut-twisting shame that he was relieved that a girl was dead, and in these moments it seemed to him that they must have willed her death somehow, that their desire to protect their secret had made it happen.

  In prison he had time to think. Mostly, he thought about Edwin. They had not spoken since Edwin instructed him on what to say to the police, so Clive was left alone with the mystery of that night and what it meant—a mystery that cast its shadow back to the beginnings of his boyhood. He went over it and over it, sifting through the smallest moments and details of their shared life. He thought of the antimen on the beach before Indigo Bay was Indigo Bay, when Edwin orchestrated the ambushes to chase the men away. He thought of Jan sitting in the stifling afternoon air of Paulette’s, his eyes bloodshot with drink, his thumb beating like a heart against the sticky bar. Fleet. What was Jan’s interest in them, in Edwin, really? He thought of Alison and Julie and all the rest, the whole parade of Edwin’s pretty American daughters. Edwin always said he went after them because the local girls were either prudes or skets or gossips, and Clive had always been impressed with himself for knowing better than to believe this. He had thought Edwin pursued these girls because they came from the places he dreamed of going, because he hated them for their stupid good luck even as he tried to draw himself closer to his dreams through their sweet-smelling skin. And maybe that was part of it. But what if there was something else, too? What if he chose these girls because whatever happened, or didn’t, they were leaving, gone?

  No matter how much he thought about it, without knowing what that night had meant to Edwin, it was impossible to determine what it had meant to himself. What would have happened next? What future was thwarted because that girl went off and got herself killed?

  Edwin did not come to see him in prison. His grandmother did, every Sunday. She sat stiffly across a folding table from him in the visitors’ room, beneath an overhead fan that ticked as it uselessly stirred the warm air. It was from her that he learned that Edwin was looking in on Sara and Bryan in the evenings. He had been fired from Indigo Bay, of course, but recently he had started a new venture silk-screening island-themed apparel—T-shirts with palm trees, neon sunsets, a pineapple wearing sunglasses, slogans: I’M ON ISLAND TIME. WHAT HAPPENS ON THE CRUISE STAYS ON THE CRUISE. His merchandise was already in a few of the souvenir shops in Hibiscus Harbour. He was giving Sara money. Clive was grateful. Edwin had always helped him, and he was helping him now, as Clive still believed he always would.

  Two months after his release from prison, he flew to New York. He thought Edwin might come to say goodbye, but when the time came to drive to the airport in his grandmother’s church friend Verna’s car and Edwin had not come, he was not surprised.

  He made his way in New York, as he had already told me. He built a life passed in the fellowship of other solitary men. He had been gone three years when Sara told him she had marrie
d Edwin. That was over fourteen years ago, so long that it was difficult to believe it wasn’t always true, that there was a time before the mother of his child married his best friend. He had been through so much. He had lost his father and been abandoned by his mother, gotten a girl pregnant and become a father too young, been a suspect in a murder, gone to prison, started over in a new country, had the shit kicked out of him in a vacant lot in Brooklyn. Yet it seemed to Clive that the man who lived through all that was still an innocent, for he had not yet lain awake at night imagining his son walking between Sara and Edwin, one hand in each of theirs. His boy, laughing with delight as they lifted their arms and swung him into the air.

  Why had Edwin done it? Did he love Sara, or had he only married her to hurt him, to reject the love that had hung in the stars like an open question on their last night together? Or maybe marrying Sara had been a way of holding on to the only part of Clive that Edwin could have—Bryan; maybe Edwin’s most wounding action was also his greatest act of devotion.

  Two years after Sara and Edwin married, Clive received a letter from his grandmother. It was autumn. He remembered because just before he found the letter in the metal mailbox he shared with his roommates, he paused on the stairs outside the apartment building to scrape the tacky samara wings from the bottoms of his shoes. He read the letter in the dark hallway. Buried in updates about the renovation of St. George’s, about the local election and Verna’s nieces from Toronto, was the news that Sara had given birth to a son, Edwin Jr. Eddie for short. Clive saw his son and Edwin’s growing up together. More than mates, more than breds. Brothers. The thought of it was so sweet to him his chest ached. He knew that to feel this way after what Edwin had done made him a chump. Edwin had stolen the only life he had ever wanted, a quiet existence with Sara and children and not-so-bad work and Sunday afternoons at Little Beach. Yet he was grateful. It seemed to him that this life was better off without him in it, for surely he would have spoiled it with his clumsy touch.

  What if he had known everything that was waiting for him? What if, when Edwin approached him in the schoolyard on the first day of second grade, back when he was only Clive, you had shown him all that was going to happen and said, Will you take this life? What is there to say? He would have walked right up to Edwin and joined the game. Because of Edwin he’d lost everything, but without him, he would not even have had these things to lose. He needed Edwin. He could make no sense of his life without him.

  Years passed. He was thirty-five. One summer evening he was walking through Prospect Park—the air redolent with charcoal, laughter and music wafting into the huge night above the lawns—when he heard his name.

  “Gogo? Clive fucking Richardson, is that you?”

  It was Bery Wilson. She marched right up to him and wrapped him in a tight embrace. “I’ve thought of you,” she said. That was as close as she came to talking about the past. She told him she was an artist now—something about the city as canvas, pain as art. She wore her hair in a Mohawk, shaved on the sides and natural on top. In the purple twilight, he could make out tattoos of birds on her arms. An Asian girl and a white guy ambled over and said hello. Bery introduced them to him as members of her collective.

  “Join us,” said the guy.

  “We have veggie dogs,” said the girl.

  “Yes, please, come sit,” Bery said with a smile. How had she managed it? The anger seemed to have evaporated out of her altogether.

  He told her he was running late, though the truth was he had nowhere to be.

  “I understand,” she said. Then her face turned serious. “You’ve heard about Edwin?”

  Clive spent the months after Bery told him that Edwin was dying waiting for his friend to reach out to him. (“Cancer,” she’d said, and when he asked what kind she said she wasn’t sure, she only knew that it was everywhere now.) He imagined it so many ways. He would be getting out of the shower, or paying for dinner at the Little Sweet, when his cell phone would ring. “He’s asking for you,” Sara would say. Clive would fly home, arriving just in time. The house would be dark and quiet, Bryan and Eddie having been sent out to occupy themselves despite their protestations, for they knew their father was dying and did not want to leave his side. Clive would walk through the kitchen and the parlor to the bedroom. When he first saw Edwin in the bed he would gasp. His friend would be unrecognizable—his skin ashen, his cheeks sunken, the sockets of his eyes alarmingly prominent.

  Hey, Gogo, Edwin would say, as if it had been only hours since they’d last seen each other.

  They would talk. About the boys. About their own boyhoods. Remember the time we climbed the radio tower? Remember sneaking into E.T.? Remember, remember, remember. Edwin would close his eyes, as if drifting off to sleep, and for a minute Clive would think he was gone. Then Edwin would open his eyes again, and when he did they would be glazed with tears. He would look up at Clive with that old grin.

  Will you miss me? he would say.

  Clive would take Edwin’s trembling face in his hands. He would lower his head and kiss his best friend lightly on the forehead, and they would know without having to say it that all was forgiven.

  But Clive did not hear from his friend, and one day his grandmother called and told him that Edwin had died. He tried to wrap his mind around the truth that Edwin was not still down on the island, away from him, unseen for years, but still there, still here, but he couldn’t. It was only then he recognized that all these years he had held on to the buried belief that someday, somehow, they would be brought together again, and that in their new, shared aftermath they would have all the time and words and silence they needed to understand together everything that had happened. Now this would never be. He had moved into another chapter of his life, one in which he would have to live without the possibility that the central mysteries of his life would be demystified.

  Ever since, his days passed like walking downhill. He drove his taxi, moved from apartment to apartment. He kept apprised of the news in the lives of his friends and acquaintances. There was a gallery in Fort Greene where from time to time he saw Bery’s sculptures on display. He and Ouss still got together once or twice a year for a meal. Ouss and his wife owned a hardware store on Tremont Avenue. They had four girls; the eldest was on a full scholarship at Exeter.

  At night, he walked. Every evening when he set out, the details of the neighborhood were overwhelming—a lover’s quarrel on the sidewalk, blinking lights in the windows of an electronics store, peaches at a fruit stand so ripe their perfume made him woozy. But the longer he walked, the more the city receded, until the world around him rendered itself invisible and he began to hear water lapping against the edges of the metropolis, which became water lapping at the edges of another island, and then he was not walking through New York anymore, but through the landscape of that other world, that other life. He would stop at a basketball court or a playing field to watch the boys at play, and he would see them all there, shouting and tussling on the pitch, Edwin and Des and Damien and Don. Sometimes a boy left the raucousness of the game behind to sit in the grass, or to hum a song to himself, and Clive knew that he was Bryan; his boy was beautiful and sweet and everything good. And once a year, he walked to Manhattan Beach with its gray sand and its mangy gulls swirling overhead and ate an American chocolate bar that tasted all wrong but was the best he could do, and in this way he marked the day he lost all of them forever.

  If only Alison hadn’t found it so necessary to stir up the shit between him and Edwin, to intrude in things she didn’t understand. If only she hadn’t gone off and done whatever she did. It wasn’t just her own life she was risking—had she thought about that? Had it occurred to her for even a moment?

  And if only … if only they hadn’t taken her out with them. If only they hadn’t been taking pretty white daughters out with them for months like the world was a place it most definitely wasn’t. If only he had gone after her when she ran. If only he’d called out to her. “Wait, don’t go,”
and maybe he wouldn’t be sitting here now, with his hands numb and the snow falling on his coat.

  “But I never would have. He told me to let her go and I did.” He put his head in his hands.

  “You couldn’t have known,” I whispered. I placed a hand on his back, but he jerked away from my touch. He stood and brushed the snow from his windbreaker.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You can’t just leave! There’s so much more I want to ask you. I know there must be more you want to ask me, too. We can be open with each other now. We don’t have to hide.”

  “You wanted the truth and now you have it. What more could you want from me?”

  I understood then what I did want, what I had wanted for months. There was a version of this story in which two lost souls whose lives had been irrevocably altered by the same long-ago night found each other in New York and, in one of those unexpected turns you hear about with surprising frequency, built a new life together. It was the best version of the story, one with the power to salvage everything that had happened. At the same moment it became clear to me that this was what could have happened, I also understood that it would not happen, and that from then on I would be living in a different aftermath—no longer the aftermath of Alison’s death, but of this winter in New York with Clive Richardson. For, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are always living in the aftermath of something.

  “It has to mean something that I got into your cab. Don’t you see? All of this was supposed to happen. Please,” I said uselessly.

  He looked up at the sky and shook his head. “The crazy thing is I knew. I must have, right? That something with you wasn’t … You just seemed so lost and lonely.”

  “I am lost. I am lonely. Clive, please. It’s still me. I was just a little girl.” My eyes filled with tears.

  For a moment, as he looked at me, he seemed to be peering into the past, seeing the strange sunburned child I once was. He nodded. “I know.” Then he slipped the wool hat from his head and stuffed it in the pocket of his coat. “Goodbye, Claire.”